SPENCER: Isabel, welcome.

ISABELLE: Thank you. So glad to be here.

SPENCER: We have so many ways to generate power, right? We've got oil and gas, solar, hydroelectric. Why do we need nuclear as part of that?

ISABELLE: Because we need a lot of power. And I think this is something that has been kind of underestimated the last few decades. There was a general understanding that our electricity consumption had somewhat stayed the same. And that's actually, that's a fair assessment of the last couple of decades. However, it's become very clear, especially now as we enter the age of AI, that we need a lot of electricity. And we have been moving the past few decades as well towards cleaner energy sources. So, you know, coal, oil and gas, as much as they are options, they are worse options because they are not as clean as solar, wind, hydro and nuclear.

SPENCER: Okay, so for those that are persuaded that global warming is a real problem, like myself and I imagine you, we might ask, okay, but can't we just switch to using solar and hydro and wind? Why are they not good enough? Why can't we just scale them up to cover the energy needs?

ISABELLE: Well, first, I think even if you're not concerned about climate change, which a lot of people aren't, or they claim that even though, yes, it might be a problem, it's not being caused by humans, which I disagree. And it seems like you disagree as well. At the end of the day, these energy sources, they also generate a lot of air pollution, which already, on its own, forget about climate change. This already claims at least 4 million people every single year. So in my opinion, if we can move towards technologies that can provide us with the same product, in this case being electricity, while also reducing the impact on human health and the environment, that's a win in my book. So why can't we do it all with just solar and wind? Well, it's one of those annoying things that we get into the technicalities. Could we power the whole world with solar and wind? Yes, maybe. Technically, if we were to restart the entire grid from, from scratch, and if we were designing the entire world to accommodate the sources of energy. But in reality, the world is a lot more complicated than that. So just to give you an example, there are parts of the world that are sunnier than others. So solar makes sense there, but it doesn't really make sense in other places. So people say, well, we'll just build this super grids that will carry the electricity from one place to the other. And sure you could, but what is the political capital that's involved in that and what's the actual Amount of dollars that's also involved in that. So it's one of those things that it gets very, very, very complicated to power the entire world with renewables just because of how intermittent they are and how dependent they are on geography. And so why the question, I turned that around to you and is why not nuclear when we know that it makes it easier because you have to build less nuclear plants and it's way more reliable than other sources of clean energy.

SPENCER: Right? Well, you touch on a serious issue, which is transmission of energy and storing of energy. You know, people might think of it like water. Oh, yeah, of course, we're going to move water around from the places that have water to places don't have water. You know, you're going to get it from a reservoir. Can you just talk a little bit more about what are the challenges of storing energy and moving it around?

ISABELLE: As you mentioned, I think this is clear to everybody. Obviously, the sun is not shining all the time and the wind isn't blowing all the time. For those reasons, solar and wind are not reliable sources of energy. But it's not even as little as the sun goes down every day. And so we know that during that time, solar panels are not going to be producing electricity. It's also, if it gets cloudy, if there are wildfires, like in California, when there were wildfires, you know, the past couple of years, people would report that their solar panels weren't producing electricity because there was this, the fog covering them. And with wind, obviously, if the wind is not blowing and it stops all the time, it's highly, highly unpredictable. So people's solution is, okay, we know they don't work all the time, but this is what we can do. We can just get a bunch of batteries to store that electricity for later when it needs to be used. In theory, it sounds good. Again, technically, there is no reason why this shouldn't work. But then you start getting down to the details. And most of the batteries that we have today, they have a limited capacity to store electricity. Sure, they're going to store electricity to be able to cover for the fluctuations throughout the day. But there are many places, in many situations where the wind doesn't blow or the wind or the sun doesn't shine for days and sometimes even weeks at a time. You know, in Texas, I think there's a study that came out where the winds didn't blow for nine weeks at a time or something like that. And so what do you do during those periods? Right. And so, well, you just have even more batteries. But then to store all of that excess electricity, then you have to do something which is called overbuilt solar and wind capacity. So you know, Instead of building one solar farm, you have to build 10 solar farms to be able to store all of that electricity. For the worst case scenarios, which is, you know, when for weeks you don't have that, that reliable supply of electricity.

SPENCER: Is that because the energy is lost during the storage process?

ISABELLE: No, it's mostly because if the sun is shining, it's shining at the same time and when it's not shining, it's not shining at the same time. So you want to be able to store all the excess electricity when the sun is shining. Right. So then you start getting into all of these things. Oh, then we just overbuilt by a 100x and we just build this gigantic batteries, farms and it's like, wait, why are we doing all of this again? Oh, because we don't want to build nuclear.

RYAN: Please note: as one listener pointed out, this 100x figure is hyperbole and not a literal estimate. Additionally, overbuilding is always needed in some sense, since energy demands naturally fluctuate. Now back to the discussion...

ISABELLE: And you get to the conclusion fairly quickly that this whole obsession with so called renewables only really stemmed from a belief that we shouldn't or couldn't build nuclear anymore. And now I'm not saying it should be all nuclear, but if nuclear can provide what people call base load, which is that reliable constant output of electricity, then you have renewables on top of it doing their thing, fluctuating up and down, and you have batteries in the middle, kind of stabilizing everything. That's really what we should want out of our grid.

SPENCER: Many of the smartest people I know on this issue are in huge support of nuclear power. But I've also heard people write articles that say, oh, it's totally ridiculous, there's no way it could possibly be used. Now look at the cost of it. It's completely not cost competitive. Look at a bunch of countries are shutting down their nuclear plants like the people don't want it. Nobody wants nuclear power plant in their area. So what are some of the barriers to actually getting it deployed?

ISABELLE: It's funny because sometimes so much of the conversation out there is also not reflective of, of the reality, right? So people say this nuclear is done, nuclear is dead, nobody's building nuclear plants yet. Next year is going to be the highest amount of nuclear ever worldwide. And we know that that amount is just going up in the next couple of years. Now I'm not saying that that means the industry is thriving by no means. Especially as we're talking about the west, right? Especially as we're talking about the United States and European nations. In the case of the United States, it's definitely true. We didn't build a single nuclear reactor in 30 years. So imagine that's a dead industry, right, because you have the workforce retiring, dying, or moving on to other fields. But that's not true of China or Russia, for example. So China a couple of years ago announced a plan to build 150 reactors in the next 15 years. If they do so, they're going to be the largest producers of nuclear in the world, far above the United States, which currently has around 93 reactors. And Russia is also not only building reactors domestically, they're exporting the technology to other countries, especially developing countries, where they do the whole thing. You know, they go, they build the plant for you, they operate it, and they're creating this incredible partnerships with countries for 80 years, which is about the amount of time that, you know, a nuclear power plant operates. And so this idea that nuclear is dead is absurd. Now, yes, there's a lot that needs to happen in Western nations like the United States and European nations for them to be able to get back on their prime. And yes, it is also true that nuclear is very expensive and in the United States, but again, it was a dead industry. For 30 years, we didn't build a single reactor. And then the first two that we built, which was Vogel unit 3 and unit 4, this is a power plant in Georgia, a state here in the United States. Those were extremely over budget and took forever to build. But those are first of a kind, right? First of a kind. Anything are going to be expensive and delayed and so on. So definitely we have to bring the cost down. Unfortunately, the way to bring the cost of something down is to build it over and over and over again.

SPENCER: Something we've seen throughout the US Is that infrastructure has become more and more costly and more time intensive to build. Right. It's not just nuclear. It's all kinds of things like buildings used to go up much faster. I believe that bridges used to get built faster. How much of this slowing of building nuclear has to do with that? Just that we're getting worse. And it's not necessarily worse because some of it's due to safety, some of it's safety. Some of it, though, might be extra regulation that's not needed. There's a mix of factors. But how much is due to that versus that this is new technology we're trying to implement?

ISABELLE: That's a great question. I think nobody has the precise number. It's something that's very, very hard to assess. But I fully agree with you. This is a broader problem in our society that we cannot build big projects or that it takes way longer and costs a lot more. I think there is a very common argument out there that the reason why nuclear is so expensive, it's because it's over regulated, right? And it's becoming possible to build and so on. Ensure that that certainly plays a role. And this was certainly the fact in the late 70s as regulations were changing in real time as a response to things like the Three Mai island accident in 1979. This was a time when literally overnight we developed new regulations to try to prevent an accident like that from ever happening again. And so imagine if you're a utility building a nuclear power plant, you're in the middle of a project, they completely change all the requirements. Of course that's going to increase the costs and so on, make it basically impossible to build. But if we're looking at Vogel unit 3 and unit 4, which was the most recent builds in the United States, it wasn't expensive because of regulations per se. You know, it was expensive again because nobody had ever built that type of reactor here. It was first of a kind, they were learning on the spot. And they may some crazy mistakes like they ordered the wrong rebar for the plant. And these are huge parts where the supply chain is very limited and constrained. So if you order a wrong part, it's going to take another year until you get a replacement and that's delays and so on. So all of that to say regulations certainly play a role. But I think a lot of it is to your point. We have just forgotten how to. We're not forgotten. We have gotten bad at building big things. And it's a nuanced conversation because the regulations that also sometimes make it expensive are also what make it safer. Nuclear is one of the. Nuclear is one of the safest ways to produce electricity. And in part because it is so regulated. I like to compare it to airplanes. Right. We think of it. If you think of just the fact that you're entering this metal container and you're flying at hundreds of hundreds of miles through the air inside of this metal container, that's a dangerous thing that we made safe through technology and regulations. And it's the same with nuclear reactors.

SPENCER: I heard a very interesting presentation about nuclear power which claimed, and I'm curious to hear your reaction to this, that if you look at almost any technology, you'll see a falling price curve. The price of producing the same thing gets lower and lower and lower, often falls exponentially. But with nuclear, you don't see that they claim that it's actually remarkably flat, as though somehow technological innovation wasn't happening. Their argument was that it's not due to technological innovation not happening. It's due to the way the regulations work, where as the things get safer, they're required to hit higher and higher bars of safety and so that it keeps the price the same instead of falling like every other technology. What do you think about that?

ISABELLE: I think that I don't know exactly what set of data they're looking at because I think there's also a limit to how much cheaper you can do something, especially something like a nuclear power plant, a big nuclear power plant where you have staff, you have people who work there, you have a certain level of safety requirements at the plant itself and workers and maintenance and all of these things. Right. How much cheaper can you make that? It's debatable. I think at the end of the day, you have to think about nuclear as what is the product that it's selling? Well, it's selling electricity. So all a customer who is buying something from a nuclear power plant cares is, are they selling me competitive electricity? They don't care if it's an innovative power plant. They don't care if you're using the most exotic fuel in the market. Right. They don't care about innovation per se. They just care about cheap electricity that is reliable, which is the advantage that nuclear has over all these other sources of clean energy. And so I don't fully buy into that argument. I also don't fully buy into the argument that, you know, the way to solve the cost problem of nuclear is to build advanced reactors that are smaller and that have all these exotic designs. I think we see no, absolutely no evidence that is the way to solve for the quote, unquote, cost issue. As a matter of fact, the only evidence that we do have is history looking back in the 50s, when the United States government was experimenting with a bunch of these reactor designs, including all the ones that people talk about nowadays. And what happens was they built all these different designs. Turns out that nuclear reactors are extremely complex. And so you use a certain type of coolant or a certain type of fuel, and it has a weird chemical reaction to some other component and it creates corrosion and you have to shut it down for maintenance and way more often than you imagined. And so a lot of these reactors design had very low capacity factors, meaning they were only operating and producing electricity a very, very small amount of the time because they were constantly being shut down for unplanned maintenance because of the complexity of the technology. And so, you know, the reason why we ended up with the reactors that we have today is because people realize that this one type of reactor we call light water reactors, which just use water as a moderator and as coolant, was outperforming all the other ones. Oh, and also if we made them slightly bigger, they would be able to compete with fossil fuels. And that's how we ended up with big reactors. So I think if you look historically at the idea of building smaller reactors that have exotic designs, it seems actually like a bad way to solve for the cost problem. But I know it's a, you know, I know it's an avenue that people are pursuing and why not experiment?

SPENCER: So do you not see nuclear power as excessively regulated where there's more regulation than there really should be that's actually keeping costs higher than it needs to be?

ISABELLE: I'm sure there is. I'm sure if you combed through the entire NRC and all the requirements, you can find a lot of stuff that you can get rid of. It's a very hard process, obviously, because you have to come through the entire regulatory process and try to understand exactly what is causing this overruns and so on. Now I think it's doable. I think it's doable to do a project like this. It's going to take many, many years. A lot of really, really smart people trying to figure out exactly what regulations to get rid of and which ones need to stay in place for safety. What I think we need to be careful is that so much of nuclear success depends on public acceptance. Right. We know, for example, that the anti nuclear movement in the 70s had played a huge role in the demise of the nuclear industry, at least in the United States. And so when people say things like we need to dismantle the nrc, we have to deregulate nuclear, the way the regular person on the street hears that is they're going to take away all the regulations. And I don't feel safe living next to a nuclear power plant that's not being regulated. And by the way, there are a lot of people out there that are trying to build nuclear reactors. And I've seen their claims and I wouldn't feel safe living next to their nuclear reactors if I'm being quite honest. Because they're not thinking about safety, they're just thinking about break. Things build fast, let's just cut the cost of nuclear.

SPENCER: Yeah, that philosophy works a lot better when breaking just means the user interface doesn't work. It doesn't mean there's a nuclear meltdown, right?

ISABELLE: Literally. Yes, exactly. Like a great guy, guys go, you know, I'm all for it on software, but when you're talking about nuclear, which it's not even just about the accident itself, which you know would be a tragic tragedy in its own. But if you look back at, you know, the early 2010s, there was a nuclear renaissance underway. People were super excited. They were talking about small modular reactors. There was, there were orders for nuclear reactors coming in. And then Fukushima happened and it all went away. And so one accident, again, because of this very delicate history of the human species with nuclear, one accident can mean the entire industry coming down. So I understand the temptation to say, yeah, let's get rid of the regulations because it's making it too expensive. We have to understand that there's a delicate balance of public trust, safety and yes, let's analyze what's. If something is over regulation, it's just a very long process. I'm sorry, this is a very boring answer. It's much better when people are like, yes, it's over regulated. And it's like people can give you this one answer as to why something has failed.

SPENCER: Yeah. So it's appealing to blame it on people, be like, oh, it's their fault, that's why. And speaking of blaming it on people, some people argue that it's actually environmentalists that killed nuclear, that they actually protested against it and turned kind of the public against it. To what extent is that true?

ISABELLE: So the idea that environmentalists turn people away from nuclear was my hypothesis when I went into writing Red Future, which is my first book. And I thought to myself, if these people hadn't protested nuclear, we would live in a world without climate change because we would have decarbonized, you know, by the 80s because we would have built so many nuclear reactors, so on. And then coming out the other side, I realized, wow, this is way more complex than I thought it was. Yes, of course the anti nuclear movement did play a big part, but there were so many other factors that were completely outside of anyone's control, including random history facts. Right. So just as one example, in the early 70s there was the first oil shock. This was a time when oil rich countries basically said, we're not going to sell oil to other nations. And prices skyrocketed, including the United States in France. Both the United States and France had the same vision of achieving energy independence. France went all in on nuclear because they don't have fossil fuels and so did the United States but there was a difference. So did the United States go decided to go all in on nuclear back then? They do have fossil fuels. And the difference between France and the United States were a couple. One of them is France had a government led utility, which means they were placing these orders and building the same reactor design over and over and over again. In 15 years they built 57 reactors and their emissions per unit of electricity produced went down by 79%. This is not a time when people were concerned about climate change or carbon emissions that much. This is purely an energy independence play that ended up reducing emissions as a side effect. Which is interesting. Now the United States back then wanted to build about a thousand reactors. Had we built 1,000 reactors, we would be completely 100% clean electricity today and we would be producing more electricity than we actually use. Did I say something very different happened? And one of the reasons is because here there are private utilities and there's a bunch of them and each one built a different reactor design. And the most a utility would build would be a couple of reactors and then they would move on to do something else. And so we never carried those learnings from forward to a point where we got really good at building reactors, cut the cost down. And if you look historically at all the countries that have deployed nuclear successfully, they all did the same thing. They have usually a government owned utility and they just go around and build the same reactor design over and over and over again, carry the learnings forward and so on. So it's not a mystery, right, how, how to do that. But anyway, that was one of the reasons why nuclear wasn't successful. But then you also have something, you know, then you also have the accidents. You have Three Mile island, which happened in 1979 again in Pennsylvania in the United States. And what's so crazy about Three Mile island is that it happened 12 days after a Hollywood movie premiered called the China Syndrome. It starred Jane Fonda and it was about a nuclear power plant that had a near accident.

SPENCER: Oh, I didn't know that.

ISABELLE: Yes, 12 days before 3 my island happened. And by the way, the accident was eerily similar to what actually happened in the plant. Imagine, you know, the general population, which is already kind of skeptical of this technology. Then there's a big Hollywood movie about a nuclear power plant almost having a meltdown. And then 12 days later, a very similar thing happens in real life. It really spooked people out. And then of course, in 86, which is less than 10 years later, you have Chernobyl. Now, if you look at Those separately, you're thinking, okay, these are two accidents, right? Two accidents in aviation wouldn't mean the end of aviation. But it just so happened that it coincided with all the, you know, the crazy movements that were happening in the 60s and 70s and the anti nuclear movement became this huge thing that is actually hard for us to grasp nowadays. I don't think we see social movements that are that impactful and large.

SPENCER: What were people primarily concerned about? Was it that it would degrade the environment? That it would spread nuclear contamination around the whole world? That it would kill millions of people? Yeah. What was the concern?

ISABELLE: Well, I can tell you what they said and then I can also tell you what I think it is. So what they said was we're concerned with the waste, we're concerned with the impact of accidents, which of course I believe them. But I think that at. But at the bottom of it, and underneath all of these concerns is the fact that humans are, we're emotional creatures. We react to circumstances and information and everything. We react emotionally and then we use some logic to try and justify why we feel that way. And if you think about how the world was introduced to nuclear technologies, which was through the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first association with nuclear, with fission, with atoms, with atomic anything, was bombs. It's like if the world was introduced to AI through murderers, robots in the street instead of chatgpt. And so people created this very strong negative reaction to that entire technology that included weapons at the time, even today. But people created this very negative emotional reaction to nuclear. And so it already made them feel uneasy. And then there was this whole period in the early 50s when President Eisenhower delivered the Atoms for Peace speech at the UN and there was this big push for nuclear coming from the United States government. And people felt that it was a little bit icky, was a bit of propaganda. We were in the middle of the Cold War and the United States and Russia were just stockpiling a bunch of nuclear weapons. But then here's this president trying to say, now we're only going to use this technology for peace. So there's a very, very strong association with government as well. Nuclear felt like it was inseparable from the military, from government. And so when you go into this huge social movements of the 60s and 70s, which included the anti establishment movement, you can see how nuclear became this big bad guy. Right? It was connected to weapons, connected to the government. Oh, we. And we just feel really uneasy about it. And then you have a couple of accidents that just confirm all of your prior fears. So it's not a surprise as to why it became the big bogeyman that it did.

SPENCER: Yeah, you can certainly see associating it with nuclear weapons was horrible for its branding. But let's talk about how bad the accidents really were. For example, my understanding is that from these accidents, you can actually detect these isotopes around the whole world. Is that true?

ISABELLE: I think when you're talking about being able to detect isotopes around the world, people are talking about weapons testing because there was a period of. For a long time, governments could test nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. And so the radiation would just, like, rain down and. Yes, bioaccumulate and so on. And you can definitely detect that with tests. It's not the same with Chernobyl and Fukushima. A because the amount of radiation was much smaller and much more contained as well. Right. Versus it's a difference between something going into the air and depending on the wind patterns and something exploding in the atmosphere and actually just going everywhere. But yeah, let's talk about the accident. So first, I like to talk about the worst energy accident ever. And of course, when I say that, people immediately assume Chernobyl, but that's not true. The worst energy accident ever was a hydropower dam collapse in China in 1979. And this is something that the world didn't know about for 20 years because the Chinese government hid it. But it was this massive hydropower dam that got flooded basically and collapsed. And because it was upstream of a bunch of other smaller dams, it caused a bunch of other dams to collapse as well. So it swept away entire villages. It's estimated that 200,000 people died combined from dying from, like, being swept away or also just from starvation because afterwards they couldn't have food or disease and so on. So a lot of people died. Now let's talk about Chernobyl. So Chernobyl happened in the Soviet Union in 1986. And this was a really bad reactor design, quite frankly. It didn't have a containment dome, which is like a little concrete house that usually goes around a nuclear reactor. So that in the case of an accident, you don't have radiation going into the environment and a bunch of other things. So it was a bad design. It was also human error, which doesn't justify anything. But I'm just trying to explain how it happened. And yes, there was an explosion. There was some radiation that went into the atmosphere. The worst part about it was that because it happened in the Soviet Union, the government lied. They didn't warn people who lived around the area that the accident had happened. And so people who were around drank contaminated milk, ate contaminated food, and those are most of the people that got sick. But let's talk about numbers. So the confirmed fatalities from the Chernobyl disaster is 59. 59, yeah. So that was just the immediate deaths. Right. Which is crazy to think about, because even if you think about there were about 150 exterminators, people who came right after the accident happened, and they're shoveling radioactive stuff, not all of them died, which is just a crazy thing to think about. You think that everyone died and everyone who was around Chernobyl during that time died, but that's not true. Some of them got sick. Now there are cancer that later cancer deaths because of exposure to radiation. And those are much, much harder to calculate for obvious reasons, mainly because cancer is everywhere and it's been increasing steadily the last couple of decades. So it's really hard to track. But it's safe to say that if there was a huge increase in cancer cases, we would be able to detect. And also because of how radiation works, the closer you get to Chernobyl, you would see the increase in cancer rates happening very, very clearly because those are the people who are most exposed to radiation. It's not a cool thing because it was due to the accident, but after the accident happened, there was a huge international scientific community that went there and took tissue samples and have been studying the population who were exposed to radiation from Chernobyl. And so there are a bunch of studies that by now they've been tracking these people since obviously the mid-80s. 1 of 1 surprising things is that there are no birth defects from people who are alive at the time, even those who are exposed to radiation. So they couldn't detect an increase in birth defects. They couldn't really detect an increase in leukemias and other types of cancer. The only cancer that was really clearly connected to Chernobyl was thyroid cancer. They estimate that about 20,000 people develop thyroid cancers because of Chernobyl. The good thing about thyroid cancer is that it's one of the most treatable cancers. So it's like 95% survival rate. So even if people were diagnosed, you know, they were treated for it, it's not great. I'm not saying it's like a great.

SPENCER: Thing, but even with the Russian medical system at the time. That's true.

ISABELLE: Yeah. Because this was a huge international effort as well. It's not just the Russians, this. There's a whole team of international experts that was sent out to Chernobyl. Afterwards, including some American doctors. And they've been tracking the cases and doing the treatments and so on. But yeah, thyroid cancer is pretty straightforward. You just remove the thyroid and it just has a very high survival rate. Those are the numbers. Now, some people say, well, okay, let's just throw some estimates. And the most credible estimates are that 4,000 people are going to die prematurely from radiation from Chernobyl. So if we compare that 4,000 to 200,000 from one hydropowered dam collapse that is very, very tiny, and then forget about those things. Just compare that to the 4 million annual deaths from particulate matter caused by burning fossil fuels that happen every single year. Even in the best case scenario. This is just when fossil fuels are operating normally. Right? They're just out there producing electricity, not having an accident.

SPENCER: So that's through raising the chance of a bunch of diseases slightly. Right. Like the particulate matter makes you more likely to get all these kinds of health issues.

ISABELLE: That's where the premature deaths come from. It's like you develop all these other issues like heart problems and respiratory problems and so on. So it's. When you put it into context of the world and where we are today with our current technology, it really just pales in comparison. We would need something like 200 Chernobyls to happen every single year for nuclear to be as dangerous as fossil fuels currently are.

SPENCER: And is Chernobyl the worst disaster in nuclear history?

ISABELLE: Definitely. Nothing has come close. So I mentioned 3 mil island a couple of times. This happened actually before Chernobyl was 1979, and this was a partial meltdown. There were some radioactive gases that went into the atmosphere. But, you know, the cool thing about radiation is that we can track every single, like, isotope. We can track everything. And so people were able to track the type of radiation and also the amount that went into the atmosphere. And the scientific consensus is that it wasn't enough release of radiation to cause even an increase in cancers. Then with Fukushima, which happened in 2011, this was a crazy scenario because it was an earthquake. It was a major earthquake and a tsunami. The tsunami is what caused the accident. People around the area were evacuated, but they were being evacuated in the middle of an earthquake and a tsunami. So a bunch of people died in the evacuation process. So something like 2,000 people died in the evacuation process, either because they needed medical help or something. However, from radiation exposure, same thing. They don't anticipate that anybody's going to have even cancers because of the radiation exposures from Fukushima.

SPENCER: That was presumably a better reactor Design a safer reactor design.

ISABELLE: That was a better reactor design. It definitely had a containment dome. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, again, going back to the safety piece, you know, it's good. It's good that we made nuclear safer. And having a containment dome adds a lot of expense to a project like that. But in the case of an accident, it also saves lives. I don't think we can be looking at. I don't think we can look at technologies purely from a financial perspective. We have to look at what benefits it's giving us and if it's lowering the negative impact on the environment and people and so on. But, yeah, so nothing compares to Chernobyl. And I never say never, I guess, but I don't think we can even have something like Chernobyl again because so much was learned from that accident. And the nuclear industry as a whole updates itself after an incident happens.

SPENCER: So how safe is nuclear today? Is there a way to quantify that or think about that?

ISABELLE: So that's kind of like a hot topic. But I like to use the data that our world in data shares, and they've run all the numbers and the conclusion is basically nuclear is as safe as solar and wind. It's actually slightly safer than hydro because of that one accident that I just mentioned. But, you know, if you take that accident away, hydro is very safe as well. So, yeah, nuclear is as safe as renewables. It's just that because of that airplane elements to it, that if there is an accident in a nuclear power plant, it makes the news. By the way, that's the only time you hear about a nuclear power plant, unfortunately. Right. Nobody ever writes nuclear power plant quietly powers a million homes in the dead of winter. So when there's an accident, people hear about it and they become very anxious.

SPENCER: It reminds me of sharks the way that whenever you hear about sharks, it's always in the context of them attacking people. But actually they're not really that dangerous. I mean, yes, in rare circumstances they are, but it's really, really rare.

ISABELLE: They also made a point that when the movie Jaws came out, it created this panic and people started becoming terrified of sharks. Even though. Yeah, it's not really an issue. Like, we don't have an epidemic of sharks biting people.

SPENCER: It's really mosquitoes. We need to worry about sharks.

ISABELLE: We have to worry. Where is the movie about the mosquitoes now?

SPENCER: My understanding is that you have some firsthand experience with nuclear waste. Do you want to tell us about that?

ISABELLE: Oh, yes, it's my favorite thing Ever. So I think even for the people who are mostly there, they think we need nuclear. They think we, you know, they agree that it's safe. It's very hard for them to understand the waste element. And why is that? Because when a nuclear reactor produces electricity, it's using this solid uranium fuel, usually. And after a couple of years, it takes that uranium fuel out and what comes out the other side is still a solid fuel looking thing, but it's very radioactive. So radioactive that if I were to hold this waste with my bare hands, I would die. So we've developed incredible ways to deal with nuclear waste precisely because of how radioactive it is. So what happens now is that fuel goes into the reactor, makes electricity, comes out the reactor very radioactive. And it's put inside of a swimming pool, just a normal swimming pool, because water is actually really good at blocking radiation. So I was really surprised to learn this, but when I went to visit my first, what's called a spent fuel pool, which is the swimming pool where they put the waste. You can walk around and this waste, extremely radioactive waste, is just sitting there in this pool. But the water is protecting you from the radiation.

SPENCER: Like the radiation hits the water molecules as it's trying to come out. Can't get through so many. Is that what's happening?

ISABELLE: Yeah, basically it's just like slowing down the particles. And it's a lot of water. Right. It's a very, very deep pool. And it's actually so safe that somebody can swim. Somebody does swim. That's their job. They will like swim and make sure everything is okay. You cannot touch the fuel, you cannot swim very, very deep down, but you can actually swim in the surface and so on.

SPENCER: What's your job? I swim in nuclear waste every day.

ISABELLE: I know. I would love to meet, I would love to meet somebody who does that job. Then it comes out of the pool and it goes into this big concrete cast that looks like a Pringles can. And again, concrete is also really good at blocking radiation. So if you go to a nuclear power plant here in the United States, you can actually go and visit the waste facility. It's a whole thing, but you can do it. You can touch this cask from the outside and nothing's going to happen to you. You're not going to get a meaningful dose of radiation even because this is so good at blocking radiation. And so it's become one of my favorite things to go around nuclear power plants and take photos of the waste, kissing the waste cask, touching the waste cask, just walking around it, because it's one of those things where people have all of these ideas and fantasies in their mind of what nuclear waste looks like. You know, they've seen the Simpsons, so they think it's this like glowing green goo that's just moving everywhere, contaminating things, and it's the most boring thing on planet Earth. If you were to look inside, it's like, again, this, like solid pellets that are just fuel that went inside the reactor come out the other side and it just sits there. And because nuclear is so dense, you know, a tiny, tiny bit of uranium can actually create a ton of energy. So if I were to get my whole life's energy from nuclear, my waste would fit inside of a soda can. So it's a very small amount of it, very compact, completely contained. And, you know, I think when you look around the world and you think about waste in general, not just nuclear waste, but the waste we create as a species. For somebody who lives in New York City, you know what I'm talking about, you step outside every day and you're like, oh my God, just so much trash, so much waste that we produce every single day.

SPENCER: Well, we have a new plan in New York. They're going to try to put the waste into these waste baskets that are closed. I don't know why it took so long.

ISABELLE: I love that it's 2025 and we're talking about having trash bins in New York City.

SPENCER: Innovation.

ISABELLE: Yeah, innovation. But anyway, it's like, okay, so we're really concerned about arguably the only waste that we have a plan for that we know that we're taking care of instead of all the other waste that we're just throwing into the environment. But I understand this because it's radioactive. So how do we prevent it from harming people in the future and thousands of years from now? I appreciate that we're thinking about this and what's cool is nuclear engineers who focus on ways they actually think about all this worst case scenarios. But what happens if, you know, humanity dies, becomes extinct, and then an alien visits planet Earth? How do we warn aliens of the future that this is nuclear waste and they shouldn't touch it? People actually go through these exercises.

SPENCER: I was reading about this. They're trying to figure out how do you market in such a way that nobody thinks that it was like, you know, a special site of honor and like they're trying to basically scare away, you know, people 3,000 years from now?

ISABELLE: Yeah. Either people 3,000 years from now, in case people 3,000 years from now, in case we lose language, in case we stop being able to communicate through language. And English, nobody understands English anymore. And so they're trying to people warn people of that, which is interesting, because if civilization collapses and we lose the ability to communicate via language, I find it hard to believe that we're still going to maintain the capability of digging very deep into the earth and having this specialized machinery that can crack into these casks. Because here's the other thing about these casks. They've been tested for everything. They've had like trains slammed against them, they set it on jet fuel fire. They've tested these casks for everything because obviously they wanted to survive accidents and so on, and they survived every single scenario. So, okay, so we're going to lose the ability to speak English and civilization is going to collapse, but we're still going to have this very specialized machinery that's going to open into these casks and then we're going to die. It's just like, okay, at some point we got to put the sci fi book down. But at the same time it's like, okay, let's think about this and let's think about this for everything else that we do as a civilization maybe. And so I actually came out the other side of this exercise thinking the way we think about nuclear waste and the way we handle nuclear waste should be how we handle waste should be how we handle plastic waste. Right? I wish people 100 years ago were like, what if we throw all of this plastic into the ocean and it breaks down into microplastics and then the fish eat it, and then people eat the fish and all of a sudden they have microplastics in their testicles. Like, I wish people were thinking about this a hundred years ago. So I don't know. I think because of how dangerous nuclear waste can be, it has actually forced us to be better about handling waste and asking these really important questions. And now it should serve as an example.

SPENCER: How cost effective is nuclear power really? Because there are some people that argue that, like, oh yeah, it's all nice, it's all great, it's great for the environment, but it's just going to cost too much, it's going to take too long. So it's going to be too expensive relative to the alternatives. And by the time we get online, it's not even worth it at that point.

ISABELLE: So how expensive is it? That's like a very big question again, because there's all different countries that have different costs.

SPENCER: But let's Say, if we try to do it in the U.S. right.

ISABELLE: I can tell you this. China is building reactors, nuclear power plants that are competitive with American methane gas at the prices are the same as American methane gas plants, and they're building them in three to four years. So it's entirely technically possible to build reactors that are cheap or at least competitive with fossil fuels and that are built fast. What's the truth in the United States? Well, Vogel 3 and 4 are the only examples in recent history and they were about $17 billion over budget and they took about 12 years to be built, these two reactors. Now again, those are first of a kind numbers we would obviously get down. Just even from reactor three to four, which were built back to back, obviously there was already a decrease of 40% in cost and time. And so you can just extrapolate from that data, if we kept building the same thing over and over, we would be able to bring those costs down. Now, it's expensive compared to what? Well, it's definitely expensive compared to fossil fuels. It's hard to compete. We already have all the infrastructure and fossil fuels are cheap. Cost fluctuates, obviously, but they are relatively cheap. Now, of course, my argument would be we're not accounting for all the externalities like climate change, but then also all the deaths that are caused because of from burning fossil fuels. How does it compare to renewables like solar and wind? It's complicated because it's hard to compare one thing to the other again because solar and wind are so unreliable. So a more fair comparison, you have to be able to compare systems, right? You have to be able to compare a system that provides electricity for the same amount of time. And so you actually have to compare it with solar and wind plus batteries. And once you start adding the cost of batteries, oh, and actually you have to add a bunch of transmission lines because you need to build more solar and more wind to be able to charge all the batteries. And so you have to build more transmission lines. And once you start adding those external costs, renewables start actually being very expensive and almost the same cost as very, very expensive nuclear. So is nuclear expensive? Yes, but. And there's a big but there that I think we haven't really dug down into that conversation, but people are starting to realize that more and more. I joke about the fact that for the past 10 years or so, people who just promoted renewables would say, of course everybody knows that the sun isn't always shining, lol. But they would talk about it as if it wasn't a big problem. But of course, it is a big problem because we have built our civilization on on demand electricity. You know, we want to charge our cars whenever we want to charge our cars. We want to use our laundry machines whenever we want to use our laundry machines. And so we have built an entire civilization that depends on, depends on access to 24. 7 electricity. So, yes, we have to solve these problems and it adds to the cost. So when you, when you add all of those costs, nuclear is actually not that expensive.

SPENCER: Yeah. Especially if we could get our act together as a society and be able to build infrastructure properly. Right.

ISABELLE: Well, and that's the thing, right, that I think is actually the big question. It's what if, you know, people are on board with nuclear? And this is something that I'm currently grappling with, which is we currently have the public support. Right now in the United States, 61% of Americans support adding more nuclear to the grid, which is one of the highest levels of public support ever. The highest level was actually 62% in 2010, a year before the Fukushima accident happened. And so just goes to show how one accident can influence public support so much. And so we have all this public support. We have the understanding that we need nuclear not just from a climate perspective, but also from an energy independence, energy reliability perspective. And you know, all of these AI companies, data center companies, they're desperate for electricity. So we have all of the support. What if we can't get our act together and deliver? And that's, and that's a question that I think a lot about, like, what is it going to take for this nuclear renaissance to happen? Because again, it's undoing decades of an industry that was very much dead in the United States. And it's trying to build this massive project again, or trying to get advanced nuclear off the ground, which is by no means guarantee. There's just, there is no guarantee that these plants are going to be able to provide cheaper electricity than the largest ones. And by the way, there's not even guaranteed that they're going to be viable products. Right. There are something like 80 new companies, new nuclear companies selling different designs and all promising to make Nuclear cheap again. 99% of them are going to fail. That's just the nature of technological innovation. And so what are the next five years going to look like?

SPENCER: Is there a progressive conservative split on nuclear power?

ISABELLE: There is somewhat, definitely. Conservatives tend to like nuclear more for the same reasons that progressives tend to not like nuclear, which is this connection to big government. It's seen As a top down thing.

SPENCER: You know, even though it's so good for the environment. Right. You might think it could go the other way.

ISABELLE: You would think actually if you're looking from an environmental and also a human capital perspective. So nuclear plants employ a bunch of people. This one nuclear plant in California, Diablo Canyon employs 1200 people. And these are high paying, stable jobs. It's very beneficial for communities. All of these jobs at nuclear plants are union jobs. When you're talking about an environmental perspective and a human capital, progressives should be purely aligned with nuclear. Right. But there is this history, there is this history of connection to the military and there's this history of connection to the government that turns a lot of progressives off and they like more the idea of solar, community owned solar. Even though community owned solar is very much BS because at the end of the day the same utilities that run nuclear power plants also are the ones that built huge solar farms. So I think this idea of like, oh, we're all going to have our independent little solar things, I think it's more fantasy frankly than anything else. But there is a split, but the most visible split is between men and women, which is observed in every single country where, you know, people are asked about how they feel about nuclear and women tend to be against it and men tend to be for it.

SPENCER: That's fascinating. Do you know why that is?

ISABELLE: Probably a combination of factors as well. One of them, and it correlates with the progressive versus conservative in general. Men tend to be more focused on power structures, on hierarchies and women tend to be more egalitarian and thinking more about the community aspect. And so those are kind of correlated with, with conservative and progressive. But then there's also the perception of risk. And in general women tend to be more risk averse and men tend to be more risk tolerant and nuclear is still perceived as a high risk technology. So a lot of women get turned off by that. Women in general tend to be more connected to nature and there's this view that nuclear is unnatural, it's sci fi, it's totally human made. And that's one of the reasons why I talked about in my book Red Future about the fact that there were natural nuclear reactors on Earth about 2 billion years ago, which is just mind blowing and such a fun fact.

SPENCER: What were those?

ISABELLE: They were in Gabon, in Africa. So this was just some uranium deposits that. Because at the time I'm going to use a term that's very incorrect, but it's just the simpler, the simplest way to explain it these uranium deposits were a lot more radioactive. And because of certainly geological conditions like the type of rock underneath them, whenever it rained, water would pool around these deposits and that would allow for chain reactions to happen. And so for millions of years, there were these natural nuclear reactors just turning themselves on whenever it rained enough for water to pool, which is very cool. And the way they found this out is also fascinating. It was this French scientists from a nuclear power plant, they were buying uranium fuel, or they were buying uranium from this mine in Gabon. And because everything to do with nuclear so tightly regulated, they were weighing the uranium concentrations in the uranium rock, and they realized that this one shipment had lower concentrations of the radioactive isotope of uranium than it should be. And so they're like, oh, my God, are these people getting uranium for bombs? And so they launched an entire investigation. And they went to the mines and realized that actually all the rocks around there were less radioactive than they should be. And they started investigating more and they started finding nuclear waste. And that's how they discovered that there were these natural nuclear reactors, which was something that scientists had already speculated that could have existed. But then we just got like, physical confirmation.

SPENCER: And of course, our solar power comes from nuclear reactions.

ISABELLE: Yeah, the fusion, fusion nuclear reactors. But these reactors were actually fission.

SPENCER: So almost all the nuclear reactors are fission. But there's this, all of them, technology, isn't there? Experimental fusion reactor in France.

ISABELLE: It's not a functioning reactor. It's like being built. And there are no fusion reactors on Earth that produce electricity. There are experiments in labs, and they will produce a minimal amount of electricity for a very, very short amount of time. And that's just experiments. But there are no commercial fusion reactors. And, you know, it's an interesting. It's an interesting concept, right? So as you mentioned, fusion is what happens in the sun. So fission is when a bigger, bigger nucleus of an atom splits, and that split, you know, releases energy in the process. And then fusion is when two smaller atoms smoosh together. And that when they combine, that also creates energy that's released. And that's what happens in the sun all day long. But for us to be able to fuse atoms together, you need such insane amounts of energy because you need to basically recreate the conditions of the sun on Earth because it needs to be extremely high temperatures. And so it takes a ton of energy to produce a small amount of energy on the other side. So only recently, in the last couple of years, they figured out how to get more energy out of the entire process than that went in. Now it's exciting. I think it can happen. We're entirely capable of creating fusion reactors. But it's a pet peeve of mine because I've heard enough people saying, oh, we don't even have to build fusion fission plants because we have fusion right around the corner. And it's like, no, we like in a lab, we figured out how to get a little bit more energy out of this entire system. But it might take 40, 50 years for us to be able to actually have a product that we can sell. Because again, at the end of the day, the end product of a fusion reactor is cheap electricity. Right? And if you can't provide that, then you don't have a viable product.

SPENCER: My understanding is even those fusion reactions that seem to get more energy out than in, it doesn't even take into account every bit of energy that they're using in the process. It's like not even really viable in the least right now.

ISABELLE: It's definitely not viable right now. Like we shouldn't even be talking about fusion. Yes, let's do the experiments and let's fund the research. And I'm glad that some people are putting money into it. But to me it's a mistake to talk about fusion as an existing technology, period. It doesn't exist. By the way, I feel the same way about so called advanced nuclear, about small modular reactors. It doesn't exist. If I'm a utility company and I say I want to build a small modular reactor, they can't because none of these companies have built a prototype, none of them have a license, none of them can start building something tomorrow as a product. They can build, experiment.

SPENCER: So you say let's use the technology that already works.

ISABELLE: I'm saying let's keep innovating. Yes, I'm all for let's get a bunch of these nuclear startups and go to a piece of land in the middle of nowhere and build their prototypes and hopefully it works and great. But in the meantime, let's just build whatever we have that we know works that we can start doing tomorrow. That's at least how I see it.

SPENCER: The whole problem do modern environmentalists largely support nuclear or is it more divided? What's the current stance?

ISABELLE: The current stance, I would say most people have come around. So one very famous example is Stewart Brandt. He is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. I don't know if you remember this, but in the 70s this was a very big environmental publication. He used to be extremely anti nuclear, as was everybody back then, and he changed his mind. So in the last couple of decades, he's been advocating for nuclear, and there are quite a few people like that. Unfortunately, Jane Fonda is still extremely anti nuclear. Clear. I tried having that conversation with her, but didn't go anywhere. But I would say moderate environmentalists are definitely open to it or openly supportive. Even Al Gore, who for many, many years was against nuclear, not out of principle, but just because he had completely lost any hope that, you know, the nuclear industry could get their act together, which, you know, is not an. It's not a crazy thing to think, frankly. But even Al Gore recently says he's open to nuclear again. So there's definitely a huge, a huge shift. It's also kind of a generational difference. I see a lot of people my age and younger people who grew up with climate change being a much bigger threat than nuclear war, for example. You know, we don't have that emotional baggage that older people have, and so we're able to see the technology with a little more pragmatism. So younger people are also generally on board with nuclear. But it's. You would be, it's funny because you would be surprised. I was recently at an NRC meeting in Pennsylvania, and the meeting was with the community around about the restart of the Three Mile island plant, which is something that, you know, nobody could have imagined would have happened. But the Three Mile island plant is being restarted. Microsoft is, is behind the deal because they want to power their data center. And so there was this meeting, this Nuclear Regulatory Commission meeting to talk to the community and be able to hear their concerns and have them ask questions and so on. And I was just observing because, you know, I'm not a part of the community. But it was, it was amazing to just, people would get up to speak and I would try to guess if they would be in favor or against. And there was no way to tell. It would be this very, like this older lady in her, in her 80s, and she would be like, I am so pro nuclear, it's completely surprising me. And then there would be this really young girl who was like, obviously very progressive, very pro nuclear as well. And then you'd have everything in between. So it was impossible to tell who was going to be supportive or not. Which is also something fascinating.

SPENCER: Before we wrap up, I want to hear a little bit about your story. Right. People might think, oh, are you a scientist? You know, how did you get involved in nuclear power? And they might be surprised about your origin.

ISABELLE: My origin story is a little bit different than most people would imagine. I was born In Brazil, in a very small town in the south of Brazil when I was about 16 years old. I was leaving my high school at the time, and I was approached by a man with a microphone who invited me to attend this modeling competition the next day that was happening in my hometown at the time. And I ended up going. It was a competition for the biggest modeling agency in Brazil and ended up kickstarting an international modeling career from there. And so I ended up moving to the United States and making it my home base, which is a country that I absolutely love. And I worked as a fashion model for over a decade. But somewhere along the way, I picked up passion for science and I started following a bunch of scientists on Twitter. One of them was Carolyn Porko, who is a planetary scientist who worked on the Cassini mission for those space nerds out there, which is a mission that flew by Saturn and took a bunch of pictures, and took a picture of the Earth as well, sending it back to Earth and so on. And around about 10 years ago, Carolyn Porko tweeted about molten salt thorium reactors. And I became extremely curious about, you know, this technology. I didn't know anything at the time. I didn't know anything about nuclear, let alone whatever a molten salt thorium reactor was supposed to be, but one of those breadcrumbs that just for some reason stuck in my brain. And I didn't do anything with that curiosity and information until about five years later when after seeing the fires in Australia and the Amazon, I decided to do something with climate change. And looking into the solutions, I came across nuclear again. And this time I had the desire and the time, frankly, to just do a deep dive on nuclear and how the technology works. And I think anybody who does a deep dive in nuclear, if you come in not knowing much about it or having misconceptions about it, you come out the other side thinking the entire world needs to learn what I just learned, which is how safe this technology is, which is, you know, how it works and why we need it and all the. All the benefits of it. So thus, this was about five years ago when I decided to go all in and translate all of that heavily technical, sometimes boring science into something that people would be interested in learning from. So that's when I started posting videos on social media trying to explain nuclear in very simple terms and trying to get people who would never want to watch a video about nuclear to be interested in it.

SPENCER: And who is isado?

ISABELLE: You know, whenever I had this idea of posting content online, I actually had the idea to become a nuclear energy influencer. And I thought, okay, what does that look like? Because it can't be just me wearing a T shirt and talking about nuclear. People's going to. People are going to be too bored by that. So I wanted to do something very eye catching and different and something that would stop people in their tracks and they wouldn't be able to just keep scrolling when they saw my videos. And so I created this entire Persona called her Izodope. And she's kind of like a futuristic, maybe an alien, kind of like a female creature that lives in another dimension and is like relaying some information back to us humans on Earth. And I relied very heavily on, you know, just like Internet culture, aesthetics and some of my favorite artists. And that's how I started making, making content. But you know, it's. It's been quite amazing my journey from posting videos online to actually doing real grassroots advocacy in the world. Like I said, my whole origin story has been extremely different.

SPENCER: Yeah, definitely surprising to a lot of people. Do you have an estimate of how many people have seen Isotope?

ISABELLE: It's impossible to say. I mean, I would say at least it's impossible to say. But you know, I've delivered a Ted Talk in 2022 that was viewed 2 million times, I believe at this point. And so I would say that at least 2 million people have studied seen Izodope. I would imagine more just because of social media. Social media is really an incredible tool for anyone who has a message to share or who wants to change people's minds. You know, you can write a post on X and like my most. I would successful post on X has been viewed by 25 million people. So that's incredible, right? I don't know of anything else that you can do that can have that type of reach. So isotope has definitely been viewed by millions of people at this point, which is mind blowing.

SPENCER: Yeah, it's hard to think of other examples that are similar to me. It's such a unique thing you're doing. Do you get a lot of hate? Do people get angry at you about this?

ISABELLE: Not as much as you would expect, frankly. I was expecting to get a lot of hate in the beginning. I definitely got a lot more hate because even five years ago the vibe was very different around nuclear. When I started posting content online, the first piece of content I posted was a photo and I'm holding a sign saying nuclear energy is clean energy. And I was working as a fashion model still at the time. So this agent commented saying no it's not. And then she calls me afterwards and she's angry and telling me that I'm ruining my career. Actually, my friends just thought I was insane sane. They weren't hateful. They just thought, why is she posting crazy videos about nuclear. This makes no sense. And then some hate online. But it's mostly from people who are very hardcore environmentalists who are also de growthers. They think the only solution to climate change is that we basically stop consuming energy or drastically cut our energy consumption down. Which I think it's completely delusional. Especially I already thought it was completely delusional five years ago. But now with the birth of AI and everything, I know it's completely delusional. The notion that we're going to reduce our energy consumption is just ridiculous, frankly. So I get more hate from those people.

SPENCER: It's ironic that it's environmentalists that tend to give you the most hate when I would argue you're doing something that's actually incredibly good for the environment.

ISABELLE: But again, it's the environmentalists. It's a very specific subsect of environmentalists. And there are those that are like anti human. The only way to solve this is to have less people and to consume less energy. So they're all about just de growth. And those are people that I just, I fundamentally disagree on everything. You know, there's not even a conversation to be had because we view the world in such different ways that it's not even worth debating.

SPENCER: It's almost this idea of like purity. Right. And you can see this both on the left and the right, you know, the purity of like, oh, nature is good, humans are bad, technology is bad because it kind of corrupts nature. But you could, you know, you have purity culture on the right as well. It tends to be more about like, you know, the human body is bad, to expose sex is bad, you know, all these kinds of things. But there's sort of, there's a way in which those two cultures rhyme through purity.

ISABELLE: Yeah. And it's this, this really weird view as well, that somehow nature comes above humans and humans are evil and are a plague. And it's a lot of like original sin vibes going on there as well. But again, this is so different from how I see the world. I'm much more nuanced. I think technology is a tool, obviously, and can be amazing, but can also be terrifying. And, you know, one of the reasons why I'm glad the anti nuclear movement happened is we stopped exploding nuclear bombs in the atmosphere because of the anti Nuclear movement, that's a good thing. We also reduced the amount of nuclear weapons and we also reduced or we, we prevented the spread of nuclear weapons. And so to me those are all good things. And we, but we now get to explore the peaceful sides of nuclear and we get to develop nuclear electricity in an even safer way. So I think this, yeah, this like all or nothing black and white thinking is prevalent on both sides. But I do see, I, at least from my experience, I experience it more from the left probably because those are the people that criticize nuclear the most.

SPENCER: Final two questions for you. What are the biggest barriers to implementing nuclear right now that you see and what do you actually want people to do?

ISABELLE: So the two biggest barriers in the United States, in my opinion, one of them is lack of focus. As we talked about several times here. If you look historically when nuclear was deployed successfully, it was just they built the same design over and over and over again. So the worst thing that can happen right now is that New York builds one reactor design, California builds a different reactor design, this data center companies build a, yet a different reactor design and we never get to scale. And so we totally wasted this precious moment of all the pieces coming together and we don't get to scale. So what do we have to do? We have to focus. We have to be able to create some sort of an order book so we know there's like 10 reactors of the same design being ordered so we can send a strong signal to supply chain and so on. And then also we have to figure out the financing side. And this is the most boring part of this conversation in my opinion, because I hate finance everything. But one of the reasons why people, or utilities especially are so afraid of building nuclear is because they have to put their entire balance sheet on the line for this project. And if they go poorly, they risk losing their entire company. And so you have to find ways to de risk the financing of these nuclear projects. Those are all doable things, but it requires a lot of coordination. And again, the United States is so fragmented because it's all these different utilities and different players instead of having a government led utility or something like that. So those are the things that I think should be fixed. What do I want people to do? For those of you who are just newly on the train of supporting nuclear, I want you to be patient because I think the next five years are going to be a lot of bad headlines because all of these companies that are now trying to build prototypes are going to start going under or saying their reactor design doesn't really work or. Oh, actually it was too expensive. Expensive. It's never going to be able to compete with fossil fuels. So I think we're about to see. We are definitely in a nuclear bubble. There are companies that are going public that don't have a product and in the next couple of years there will be a lot of this company is just folding. So I want you to be patient, but I do think that if we're patient and if we can focus direct all of our efforts, amazing things are going to start happening in the next three to five years.

SPENCER: Is there an action that people can take today?

ISABELLE: The action I think people can take, the most simple action really is just be open about your support for nuclear. One of the things that I realized when I was asking people what they thought about nuclear, even before I was doing this work, I was very confused by the fact that pretty much everyone behind closed doors would say, oh yeah, I support it, it's great, we need it, but people hate it. And then I started thinking, wait, is it one of those situations where everybody thinks the other people hate it, but actually everyone is pretty much in agreement? And I think it honestly is. So the more people can just openly say, oh, yes, we support nuclear, it's not a big deal. I think it also gives social license to everybody else to do the same. And public support is so important at this moment. It always is. But it's especially at this moment because it's, you know, we're almost there and we need to have as much public support as possible.

SPENCER: Isabel, thanks so much for coming on.

ISABELLE: Thank you so much.