Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to. Here's
Speaker 1: the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policy makers,
Speaker 1: and performers, to hear their stories, what inspires their creations,
Speaker 1: what decisions change their careers, what relationships influenced their work.
Speaker 1: On March eleventh, two thousand eleven, an earthquake triggered a
Speaker 1: tsunami that damaged the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan.
Speaker 1: It was the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Today, five
Speaker 1: years after the accident, Greenpeace estimates the nearly one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand people still haven't returned home. My guest today, Gregory Yasco,
Speaker 1: was the head of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission at
Speaker 1: the time. Not a job that anyone grows up planning
Speaker 1: to be, I think. So when I got there, my
Speaker 1: first impression was really that there's this tremendous cadre of
Speaker 1: really dedicated, idealistic safety advocates who just want nothing more
Speaker 1: than to make sure that nuclear power plants around the
Speaker 1: country are safe. Are utility react utility reactors? That's right?
Speaker 1: Which there are how many? Now? Uh, there are about
Speaker 1: a hundred, down from one oh four one oh four,
Speaker 1: that's right, And operating right now. There's about and the
Speaker 1: four the close um which were Yankee for my Yankee. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's a plant in Florida, Crystal River, two reactors in California,
Speaker 1: Santa No Frey, Kawani which is in Wisconsin. And then
Speaker 1: a number of plants have recently announced that they're going
Speaker 1: to shut down Pilgrim in Vermont, UH and Fitzpatrick which
Speaker 1: is in upstate New York right now. Of the ones
Speaker 1: that have closed, what's been stated in the press is
Speaker 1: that they're closing for economic reasons, that the surge of
Speaker 1: of natural gas and to some degree renewables have really
Speaker 1: made nuke are very expensive. Correct. Yeah, it's really actually
Speaker 1: a combination of two things. The plant in Florida and
Speaker 1: the plants the two reactors in California actually closed because
Speaker 1: of safety reasons. The when you think of a nucle
Speaker 1: power plant usually you think of some big kind of
Speaker 1: concrete dome that encases all the vital components of the reactor,
Speaker 1: that the actual reactor engine and all those things. Well,
Speaker 1: in Florida, that plant they were doing some maintenance and
Speaker 1: actually broke. It sounds a small word, but it was
Speaker 1: a billion dollar or two billion dollar fixed that they
Speaker 1: needed to do to to to fix this broken containment
Speaker 1: dome and actually couldn't operate without it because it's a
Speaker 1: it's a fundamental safe. They were doing maintenance because nucle
Speaker 1: power plants have really not operated the way they were
Speaker 1: supposed to. The parts have worn out earlier. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that has worn out on these reactors
Speaker 1: is these large components. They're bigger than a bus, and
Speaker 1: so they had to replace some of these, and they've
Speaker 1: done in a lot of reactors throughout the country and
Speaker 1: actually get them out. They never had doors big enough
Speaker 1: to get this stuff out because they were never intended
Speaker 1: to get them out. So they had to actually cut
Speaker 1: a hole in this giant containment, this concrete structure which
Speaker 1: has walls that are ten ft thick or many many
Speaker 1: feet thick, and when they cut this hole, they wound
Speaker 1: up creating this crack that went essentially around the entire dome.
Speaker 1: And they just were this possible thing that could happen exactly.
Speaker 1: But the thing that you know, in a in a
Speaker 1: highly technical industry, in an industry that touts itself on
Speaker 1: on precision, on precision, something that should never have thought
Speaker 1: exactly uh now, because I don't want to, you know,
Speaker 1: beat it to death about issues of safety. I mean,
Speaker 1: certainly in the post nine eleven world, the terrorism threat
Speaker 1: has been thrown into the wheelbarrow of complaints against you know,
Speaker 1: by anti nuclear reactor advocates. But prior to that, it
Speaker 1: was about obviously storage spent fuel, and with other groups
Speaker 1: that I worked with, it was about exposure to ambient
Speaker 1: radiation in that field, and I was wondering when you
Speaker 1: were there, what were the discussions about healthy levels of
Speaker 1: exposure to ambient radiation near reactors. You know that that's
Speaker 1: always a very controversial topic and it's it's very inconclusive.
Speaker 1: It's hard to know really that when you're talking about
Speaker 1: the very low levels of radiation that you get from
Speaker 1: just ambient exposure to reactor, it's very hard to to
Speaker 1: say one way or another that that's causing any impacts.
Speaker 1: And we know from studies that have done to people
Speaker 1: who survived, say the nuclear weapons that were detonated in Japan,
Speaker 1: we certainly know that at very high levels radiation is
Speaker 1: clearly harmful. We know that it kind of middle levels,
Speaker 1: we have very strong evidence that it causes harm. And
Speaker 1: then when we get into this low area, it's just
Speaker 1: very very hard to pinpoint how this impacts people. And
Speaker 1: I would have people come into my office. There was
Speaker 1: one group of families who lived in and I believe
Speaker 1: it was in Illinois, and there was a clust of
Speaker 1: children in that community. Uh. This was around Byron or Braidwood,
Speaker 1: I believe, UM it's a little bit further inland into
Speaker 1: the state. And it was a family very well meaning,
Speaker 1: very knowledgeable, and very very concerned about their children. And
Speaker 1: I remember talking to them and we talked about this issue,
Speaker 1: and they believe that part of the reason for this
Speaker 1: cancer cluster in this community was generally in young children,
Speaker 1: was that they were exposed to some kind of radiation
Speaker 1: from the plant. And what I what I told them
Speaker 1: and what I often tell people, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: people in a lot of communities who work in nuclear
Speaker 1: power plants who live near them, and we don't see
Speaker 1: elevated cancer us. And they made a very important point
Speaker 1: to me, and they said, but you know, those are adults.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that we're learning now more
Speaker 1: and more is that children respond to radiation in very
Speaker 1: different ways, so it's not conclusive one way or another. UM.
Speaker 1: And in the NRC when you were there or to
Speaker 1: your knowledge your predecessors, did they want to have a
Speaker 1: conclusion about that or did they try to side stuff?
Speaker 1: You know, I actually tried to get an answer to that.
Speaker 1: The basis for most of what we know about how
Speaker 1: radiation impacts people and how it essentially causes cancer is
Speaker 1: from a study that was done in the nineties early nineties,
Speaker 1: and I actually as chairman, I initiated an update of
Speaker 1: that study. Who did that study and it was actually
Speaker 1: done by the National Cancer Institute uh And I actually
Speaker 1: called the head of the National Cancer in Student. I said, hey,
Speaker 1: would you like to do this? And he said, no way,
Speaker 1: I don't want to touch that issue. It's it's too
Speaker 1: too difficult, it's too inconclusive. And I said, you know,
Speaker 1: we we pride ourselves as an agency and being up
Speaker 1: to date and with the best possible information, So I'd
Speaker 1: like an update of that study. And eventually we we
Speaker 1: did some work and we got the National Academy of
Speaker 1: Sciences to do a study um and so they started.
Speaker 1: We got a lot of pressure. The industry was very
Speaker 1: unhappy about it because they were worried it was going
Speaker 1: to show something and they were worried it might show something,
Speaker 1: and in their mind it would it would be a
Speaker 1: false positive, but nonetheless it would show something that they'd
Speaker 1: have to respond to and deal with. And in my mind,
Speaker 1: it was about finding out information. Unfortunately, actually, just about
Speaker 1: a year or so ago, UM, the NRC decided to
Speaker 1: cut that effort to update that study. And why, you know,
Speaker 1: they cited the usual concerns about time resources, which is
Speaker 1: the one thing I learned working in Washington is that
Speaker 1: whenever somebody cites resources as the reason to not do something,
Speaker 1: it's usually another reason. What do you think the real
Speaker 1: reason was? You know, I think it just comes down
Speaker 1: to the fact that it's a very very difficult study
Speaker 1: to do, and the industry continued to pressure them to
Speaker 1: the point where they convinced them that it wasn't it
Speaker 1: wasn't going to gain them any useful information. And I
Speaker 1: think that's wrong. Even no information or no results, so
Speaker 1: to speak, a result that says everything's fine would have
Speaker 1: been useful. I just wanted, as a little primmer for
Speaker 1: people to say, and you and you chime in, or
Speaker 1: I'll stop for you to give your assessment. And this
Speaker 1: is a very kind of a children's book version of
Speaker 1: this even that nuclear power was developed as a weapons system,
Speaker 1: some people turned around and said, wow, why don't we
Speaker 1: run some pipes and boil some water here because we
Speaker 1: have the superheated capacity and there's really no business to
Speaker 1: be had and making just a couple of reactors here
Speaker 1: and there to build bomb material. Uh, we're going to
Speaker 1: have a source of energy. And you know the famous
Speaker 1: quote too cheap to meter. They said, well, the commercial industry,
Speaker 1: as you said, all this whole enterprise started with the
Speaker 1: need to make nuclear weapons. And then essentially people realize, well,
Speaker 1: we've got to do something else with the technology where
Speaker 1: everybody across the world is going to build nuclear weapons,
Speaker 1: so we got to get them kind of focused somewhere else,
Speaker 1: shift their their mindset a little bit to this commercial
Speaker 1: nuclear power. And that took a long time to develop
Speaker 1: because it was a risky technology and there were no
Speaker 1: companies yet who were willing to kind of bet their
Speaker 1: whole business on this risky technology. So you had to
Speaker 1: have something called the Price Anderson Act. Price Anderson helped
Speaker 1: facilitate them exactly. It provided a sense with the government
Speaker 1: said you know what, if there's an accident, we're going
Speaker 1: to cover the liability from that act, taxpayers are going
Speaker 1: to cover the taxpayers essentially and or essentially we won't
Speaker 1: we won't reimburse anybody for their damages, but you'll be
Speaker 1: kept whole as a company. And so that once that
Speaker 1: kind of came out of the risk for that company
Speaker 1: that other than any other enterprise would have to bear.
Speaker 1: Exactly why do you think that they gave the price
Speaker 1: as an exemption to that industry, You know, because I
Speaker 1: think there wasn't There was a desire to develop this
Speaker 1: technology and the government wanted to support it, and because
Speaker 1: they also wanted to support it internationally. They wanted people
Speaker 1: to take this technology. You know, you had to get
Speaker 1: very much a situation where you had to have and
Speaker 1: the have nots. You had that American companies wanted to
Speaker 1: sell this technology abroad. Absolutely, we're developing a business. Exactly.
Speaker 1: We're not just sitting there saying we want to have
Speaker 1: to nuclear technology as an example for you. We want
Speaker 1: to have nuclear technology as an example of a product
Speaker 1: we can sell. Exactly, it was an American technology at
Speaker 1: that time, and you look around the world. I wanted
Speaker 1: to grow a business, exactly. They want to grow a business,
Speaker 1: and they wanted to divert away from nuclear weapons. So
Speaker 1: they did what they needed to do, and Chrice Anderson
Speaker 1: was a big piece of it. And and then you
Speaker 1: had this, You had this Atomic Energy Commission, which had
Speaker 1: this responsibility to build nuclear weapons, to build nuclear power plants,
Speaker 1: to regulate nuclear power plants, and all of that just
Speaker 1: became too much. It was just an overload. And then
Speaker 1: in the in the late or the early seventies, they
Speaker 1: split it all off, and they split it all apart.
Speaker 1: They took away the nuclear weapons work and they just
Speaker 1: left the NRC to do the regulation. And so it's
Speaker 1: supposed to just be the place that thanks nothing more
Speaker 1: than safety. But also at the same time, you know,
Speaker 1: I was I worked with her in a stern Glass,
Speaker 1: the father, if you will, of the Baby Tooth Study,
Speaker 1: which he credits and his allies and supporters credit as
Speaker 1: helping to leverage the nuclear test band, treating with Kennedy
Speaker 1: in the sixties. And what stern Glass basically said was
Speaker 1: that a daughter element of a nuclear reaction from nuclear
Speaker 1: bombs and so forth in the atmosphere mimicked calcium in
Speaker 1: the developing fetus, and so you would take a children's
Speaker 1: first set of teeth when infant children lost their first
Speaker 1: set of teeth. We could take them. And you saw
Speaker 1: during a certain periods of time when there was a
Speaker 1: lot of radiation in the air from from bombs, a spike,
Speaker 1: and when there was the Test Band treaty, it went down,
Speaker 1: and then when the nuclear reactors were being built in
Speaker 1: the country, it went up again. And stern Glass said,
Speaker 1: you know, ambient exposure is higher than the NRC or
Speaker 1: the AC wants to admit. Then there was, of course
Speaker 1: the story that was told that Nixon wanted to have
Speaker 1: the option in his pocket to bomb Hanoi during the
Speaker 1: Vietnam War, and as a preventative measure, because he didn't
Speaker 1: want to be accused of poisoning his own citizenry, he
Speaker 1: had the a e C raised the allowable exposure to
Speaker 1: radiation months in advance of the planned bombing. I mean,
Speaker 1: the federal government has played a lot of games with
Speaker 1: the American people about exposure to radiation. Is that a
Speaker 1: fair statement. Yeah, I mean, I think in the early
Speaker 1: stages of this industry, nobody really, nobody really understood this technology,
Speaker 1: and into a large extent, people didn't understand the harmful
Speaker 1: effects of radiation. I mean, it was really until we
Speaker 1: dropped the nuclear weapons in Japan that people really understood.
Speaker 1: I mean, of course, you can go see the archival
Speaker 1: footage of people looking and watching nuclear weapons tests in
Speaker 1: the Nevada Desert, and of course those tests were originally
Speaker 1: done above ground, and then they realized, well, you know
Speaker 1: what that's that Eventually they recognize that's causing radiation exposures
Speaker 1: they I mean, there's the classic community that lives in
Speaker 1: in uh In, Utah, the so called down winders and
Speaker 1: who were exposed to radiation from the weapons test because
Speaker 1: they would wait until the winds were not blowing towards
Speaker 1: Las Vegas, but blowing in that direction. Um. So, you know,
Speaker 1: there were a lot of things that were done. I
Speaker 1: don't I don't necessarily trying to describe motives to what
Speaker 1: people were doing and why they did them, but it
Speaker 1: certainly was a technology that was new and that people
Speaker 1: didn't fully understand. And in a lot of ways, that's
Speaker 1: what makes we understand it pretty much well. And and
Speaker 1: that's what in a lot of ways makes it so
Speaker 1: tragic is that we we think we understand it better,
Speaker 1: but in some ways we don't. Um So, you look
Speaker 1: at what happened in Japan just five years ago. UM,
Speaker 1: here was a nuclear power land that was sitting on
Speaker 1: the coast of Japan and there was a massive earthquake
Speaker 1: and a tsunami and wiped out basically every safety system
Speaker 1: and you had an accident that was spewing radiation into
Speaker 1: the atmosphere for six months. And do you get updates
Speaker 1: about the situation there now? I do, UM just periodically.
Speaker 1: They encouraging, not really, UM, it's it's a it's just
Speaker 1: a tragedy. It's it's gonna be a mess there for
Speaker 1: decades to come. And there's really nothing. There's nothing you
Speaker 1: can do. It's mother nature has kind of taken over.
Speaker 1: And as much as we like to think of humans
Speaker 1: we're all powerful and we can control Mother Nature. At
Speaker 1: this point, the physics is more powerful. Is going to
Speaker 1: disperse a lot of radioactivity into the ocean for decades
Speaker 1: and that's basically what's going to have a slow seeping
Speaker 1: basis exactly. And there's there's really nothing that can be
Speaker 1: done about that. And one of the things that people
Speaker 1: who were long term members of this debate I said
Speaker 1: was the Department of Energy very cynically cited these plants
Speaker 1: where there was as often as possible cross contamination from
Speaker 1: chemical contamination, so you couldn't figure out who to blame
Speaker 1: for any kind of cancer cluster or soft tissue anomalies
Speaker 1: that were there. Oyster Creek had a lot of high
Speaker 1: rate of cancer. They're higher for childhood cancer. It had
Speaker 1: an autism cluster there. There was contamination there from sea
Speaker 1: bagage and a union carbide, and a woman that was
Speaker 1: a local advocate there prevailed upon a congressman to give
Speaker 1: her discretionary funds that were in his budget as a
Speaker 1: congressman to do some research there. And the moment she
Speaker 1: obtained the funds, union card bite settles and then on
Speaker 1: all the documents seal they don't want people to know
Speaker 1: what's underground underground there. So you have a lot of
Speaker 1: cross contamination there, and you have a lot of working
Speaker 1: class people, people who really really rely on those jobs.
Speaker 1: And some of the people I work with said that
Speaker 1: the NRC and the and the Energy Department deliberately cited
Speaker 1: these plants in places like that. Does that seem true
Speaker 1: to you? You know, not really, um, I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: just in your opinion. What would seem more to to
Speaker 1: me is that the power company may have chosen to
Speaker 1: do and and you know, I could see maybe reasons
Speaker 1: why it may have been an industrial facility because ultimately
Speaker 1: the sites were chosen by the power companies. The NRC
Speaker 1: then has to approve the site and and and and
Speaker 1: didn't work. That was the Yeah, they were chosen. They're
Speaker 1: chosen by the power companies initially, um, and then again
Speaker 1: the NRC approves it and does those things. So would
Speaker 1: it surprise me if somebody had chosen a site that
Speaker 1: had contamination that you know, was suited better to an
Speaker 1: industrial facility, like a nuclear power plant than some something else.
Speaker 1: Certainly not. I mean that would certainly make sense. And
Speaker 1: rather than having to clean up you know, what is
Speaker 1: a what is a potentially messy era, you build an
Speaker 1: industrial facility over it and you don't have to deal
Speaker 1: with that as much. So, UM, you know, I can
Speaker 1: see where there's maybe some truth to those those legends,
Speaker 1: in those myths. But responsible, Um, the Innescy's All plant
Speaker 1: wasn't responsible for the site. I didn't know that. I
Speaker 1: would have thought that the was controlling the sites themselves
Speaker 1: as well. The sites were private, and that's why there
Speaker 1: was that difficult transition period because you had this technology,
Speaker 1: which was largely controlled by the government, and then they
Speaker 1: were saying to the private sector, here, take it and
Speaker 1: do something with it, make these power plants. And the
Speaker 1: private sector said, we don't know anything about that, and
Speaker 1: we don't want to bet our companies. So you know,
Speaker 1: that's where you got prisonity, you got all these things.
Speaker 1: So there was this push to kind of get the
Speaker 1: private companies to do it and um and that was
Speaker 1: the early legacy of of the of the industry. What
Speaker 1: nuclear facility is laying on a piece of land right
Speaker 1: now the most mimics Fukushima in your mind. We're flooding
Speaker 1: on a massive scale. If some weather anomaly were to occur.
Speaker 1: Where's the Fukushima that could potentially happen in the US.
Speaker 1: It's probably in the Midwest, plants along the Mississippi along
Speaker 1: there's a handful Iowa. I actually went the summer of Fukshima.
Speaker 1: I actually went to one of these plants in Nebraska.
Speaker 1: What's it called called Fort Calhoun, And I'll never forget this.
Speaker 1: I went in a privately owned by an energy privately
Speaker 1: owned by a Nebraska utility, and the site was almost
Speaker 1: completely inundated with water, with water and you had to
Speaker 1: walk on an aluminum plank from kind of where your
Speaker 1: bridge are a long bridge, a long bridge, very long bridge.
Speaker 1: Because there was so much flooding, and what are they
Speaker 1: saying there about it? Well, at the time, you know,
Speaker 1: the NFC was monitoring it, and the flood levels were
Speaker 1: not likely to get like another six or seven inches higher,
Speaker 1: which is where the plant would have really been in
Speaker 1: very serious trouble. But what happens in the plant when
Speaker 1: when that happens, what happens, Well, everything the doors are
Speaker 1: sealed and keep the water, to keep the water out.
Speaker 1: Is it water tight? It is water tight up to
Speaker 1: a certain level, and they have a level at which
Speaker 1: they're designed to be water tight, and they were about
Speaker 1: seven I think seven inches below um, the level at
Speaker 1: which they were no longer water tight. Now seven inches
Speaker 1: of water spread out over you know, the entire floodplane
Speaker 1: the I guess around Missouri River is is a lot
Speaker 1: of water. But nonetheless there was already a tremendous flooding there,
Speaker 1: so that was really close. And it actually it just
Speaker 1: so happened that about a year before some really good
Speaker 1: folks at the NRC had identified a problem at that
Speaker 1: plant where they weren't actually watertight to the level that
Speaker 1: they thought they were, and they identified this and they
Speaker 1: made them fix it, and thankfully they had, because if not,
Speaker 1: they would have been much much closer to that kind
Speaker 1: of breaking point. Is it a densely populated area, I
Speaker 1: would have mentioned it's not. It was near I believe
Speaker 1: it's right outside of Omaha. Um so the plants not
Speaker 1: that far from a population center. Is there a discussion,
Speaker 1: I'm assuming there's a discussion. This is while you were
Speaker 1: in charge. Was there a discussion about what steps need
Speaker 1: to be taken. I'm assuming you can't raise the building.
Speaker 1: How do you drop the water level? Yeah? You you
Speaker 1: you shut down the plant. That's the first thing you do,
Speaker 1: and I mean they had shut down. You do you
Speaker 1: dig another floodplain somewhere. You know, there's really nothing Army,
Speaker 1: there's nothing they can do. There's nothing you do with
Speaker 1: the flood with the floodwaters keep rising, they keep rising, exactly.
Speaker 1: The flooding was larger result of Army core dams, so
Speaker 1: they control all this. It's actually fascinating. All this water
Speaker 1: comes from like Montana and Wyoming, all these from the mountains,
Speaker 1: from the mountains, and all the snow melts, and they
Speaker 1: had a massive snowpack that year. And so all this
Speaker 1: water comes through a series of dams that are controlled
Speaker 1: by the Army Corps of Engineers, and they have limits
Speaker 1: on how much water they let go for farming, for
Speaker 1: industrial use, for agriculture, all these different things, and so
Speaker 1: they control that to a certain extent. But if there's
Speaker 1: so much water, they have to let the water go.
Speaker 1: And so they were letting water go, and it was
Speaker 1: bringing the level of this river up, and it was,
Speaker 1: you know, there they were guaranteed to us that they
Speaker 1: weren't gonna let open up flood gates enough that it
Speaker 1: could flood the site more, but nonetheless it was it
Speaker 1: was a precarious situation. Where are you from Upstate New York,
Speaker 1: from Albany, you're from all. But what did your father do?
Speaker 1: He was an industrial engineer, specifically, what kind of worked
Speaker 1: he worked? He actually worked. I like to say, my
Speaker 1: dad's is the history of the depleting manufacturing industry and
Speaker 1: upstate New York. He started out in textiles um and
Speaker 1: we lived up in Glen's Falls, which had a big
Speaker 1: textile industry. He worked there for a while. He worked
Speaker 1: in factories, he he designed assembly lines and figured out
Speaker 1: how to move products through factories and u um, so
Speaker 1: he I got kind of my engineering technical sense from him.
Speaker 1: Are you many siblings? Are you? How many? One sister?
Speaker 1: As she an engineer too, she's a she's a she's
Speaker 1: a musician. So she's a musical engineer. Someone had to
Speaker 1: bring some soul. That's right, this dining room table. And then, uh,
Speaker 1: where did you go into crowd Cornell University? And where'd
Speaker 1: you go to graduate school? Madison, Wisconsin? And what did
Speaker 1: you study? Physics? Physics? I was a physicist. And what
Speaker 1: did you do when you got out of school? I went,
Speaker 1: I did a fellowship and which put me in Washington,
Speaker 1: d c. As a really great fellowship program from something
Speaker 1: called the Association for the American Association for the Vans
Speaker 1: from the Science. So it's a big scientific member society
Speaker 1: and they take about twenty or thirty uh fresh PhDs
Speaker 1: like myself or senior scientists, and they throw him into
Speaker 1: an office in Congress and kind of introduce you to
Speaker 1: the political process. And so that's how kind of how
Speaker 1: I got my start working in Washington. How long did
Speaker 1: you do the fellowship? It was a year and then
Speaker 1: where did you go? Then I went to work for
Speaker 1: Harry Read, Nevada Senator. How long were you with him?
Speaker 1: About four years. How did you working with Read shape
Speaker 1: your view of politics and how did you employ the
Speaker 1: perspective when you were working at the NRC. You know,
Speaker 1: the thing that I learned from him is that the
Speaker 1: most important aspect of politics, and really what makes politics
Speaker 1: work is your word. And you have to be honest
Speaker 1: with people, and you have to um follow through on
Speaker 1: your commitments. And the thing that he is masterful at
Speaker 1: better than anyone I know, is he understands what people
Speaker 1: mean when they say yes and when they say no.
Speaker 1: And he knows when he yes means a yes, and
Speaker 1: yes and means a no, and he knows when a
Speaker 1: no means a no, no means yes. Coming up Gregory
Speaker 1: Yazco on what he thinks is the future of nuclear power,
Speaker 1: also why he resigned as chairman of the US Nuclear
Speaker 1: Regulatory Commission before his term was up. Explore the Here's
Speaker 1: the Thing Archives where I speak with Antonio Jujas, an
Speaker 1: investigative reporter who continues to cover the effects of the
Speaker 1: two thousand ten BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Speaker 1: What this industry has done is taken a natural resource
Speaker 1: and turned it into a weapon of mass destruction. Take
Speaker 1: a listen at Here's the Thing dot org. This is
Speaker 1: Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. My
Speaker 1: guest today is Gregory yasco physicist and former chairman of
Speaker 1: the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. How to dispose of nuclear
Speaker 1: waste has been a problem for scientists since the technology
Speaker 1: was first invented. I worked a lot on Yucky Mountain,
Speaker 1: which is the was the plan nuclear waste repository in Nevada,
Speaker 1: so the place where they were going to take all
Speaker 1: the leftover fuel spent fuel to take us through a
Speaker 1: quick a quick trot through the history of that, I
Speaker 1: mean spent feel hasn't always been kept on site at
Speaker 1: the reactors. As we grew more and more reactors, no
Speaker 1: one sent it off site. No one. There's a few
Speaker 1: companies I think in South Carolina where they own a
Speaker 1: number of plants and they've taken some of their fuel
Speaker 1: and they put it, say at one plants they consolidated.
Speaker 1: But essentially, yes, always was on a plan somewhere exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in pools and containment pools, in pools and in kind
Speaker 1: of big concrete silos with water. Uh No, it doesn't
Speaker 1: always have to be filled with water to make it
Speaker 1: correct to take away the danger, that's right, it just
Speaker 1: needs Why are the ones that are kept in water
Speaker 1: for people who don't know anything about physics, why are
Speaker 1: they kept in water? It's essentially to cool them off.
Speaker 1: So the water acts as a kind of a heat bath,
Speaker 1: and it takes away the heat from the fuel because
Speaker 1: it's very physical, it's physically hot temperature from a temperature perspective,
Speaker 1: Once the nuclear reaction is over, they're still really really hot,
Speaker 1: so it's like it's like you don't cool off for
Speaker 1: like a long time. Exactly. Yeah, it's like your electric
Speaker 1: stove and they're radioactive and honestly, and so we need
Speaker 1: to So So when did the conversation begin as to
Speaker 1: spend fuel having to be stored at an external quote
Speaker 1: unquote facility? When did that begin? The first discussions were
Speaker 1: very academic discussions, probably in the fifties and sixties, but
Speaker 1: they weren't anything that was a practical solution for anybody
Speaker 1: knew this stuff had to had to go somewhe they
Speaker 1: they didn't know where it had to go, but scientists
Speaker 1: decided that the best place to put it was somewhere
Speaker 1: in the ground, to bury it in a mountain somewhere
Speaker 1: or something like that. It took the industry probably until
Speaker 1: the mid eighties and the government in the mid eighties
Speaker 1: to really come up with a solution. So you're talking
Speaker 1: about kind of the peak of the nuclear power boom,
Speaker 1: and it's only then that Congress is passing a law
Speaker 1: that says, okay, we we've got to figure out what
Speaker 1: to do with this stuff. So a lot of plants
Speaker 1: were built without any path for that fuel to to
Speaker 1: go anywhere. Most plants really were built that way. Most
Speaker 1: lay people who understand this only when it's written brightest
Speaker 1: in the headlines yuck a mountainous the as the name
Speaker 1: that that comes to mind as a facility that was
Speaker 1: designated in Nevada, uh to store spent fuel. And describe
Speaker 1: for me the history of that enterprise. Well, that was
Speaker 1: a very very political process because nobody wants this stuff.
Speaker 1: And back in the in the seventies, people tried to
Speaker 1: find a place in in the Midwest and they couldn't.
Speaker 1: So Congress stepped in and said, well, we're gonna solve it.
Speaker 1: We're gonna come up with an objective, fair set of criteria.
Speaker 1: And was it objective and fair? It started out that way,
Speaker 1: but as most political things are, they wind up not
Speaker 1: being how so, because the danger to Nevada residents who've
Speaker 1: obviously had their exposure from other uh Nevada residents are
Speaker 1: down winders themselves, correct from for decades of bomb testing
Speaker 1: in New Mexico and so forth. And then there were
Speaker 1: bomb test in Nevadas from Las Vegas, right outside Las Vegas.
Speaker 1: So so, um, what was the danger to them? How
Speaker 1: far has Yuck a mountain from Las Vegas. It's about
Speaker 1: ninety miles from Las Vegas. Not that far, not that far.
Speaker 1: And what's most important is that the highways that get you,
Speaker 1: they're all take you through Las Vegas. So all the
Speaker 1: fuel would have to be essentially transported without a big issue.
Speaker 1: There was a fatation exactly, yeah, the transportation and kind
Speaker 1: of a sense on the nevad AND's part that they
Speaker 1: had done their part for the country. Mean, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of radioactive material buried in the Nevada desert from
Speaker 1: all the nuclear weapons tests that we're done. So so
Speaker 1: people who so elected officials whether it be Read or
Speaker 1: others and residents there who are advocates. They basically said,
Speaker 1: we've done enough. That was that was the viewpoint. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Reed was opposed to. It was opposed to. And
Speaker 1: we even in spite of reeds opposition, How much money
Speaker 1: was spent developing yuck A Mountain before they abandoned the project.
Speaker 1: It was billions of dollars. How how did that happen? Well, essentially,
Speaker 1: Congress passed the law that said we don't care with
Speaker 1: Nevada things, and we're going to do it, and they
Speaker 1: overrode any of Reed's protests or the indigenous protests, and
Speaker 1: then they started to build this thing. And what essentially
Speaker 1: is it. They dug a number of tunnels, they did tests,
Speaker 1: and then it's now closed. So there's pad locks and
Speaker 1: gates barring the entriens of dollars with tunnels. Yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: one tunnel, yeah, one or two tunnels. Yeah. They would
Speaker 1: have stored the facilita the material in several different you know,
Speaker 1: kind of containment. Uh said, they would have get out
Speaker 1: like a cave and opened up the mountain and then
Speaker 1: brought the nuclear waste in. Over decades or actually over
Speaker 1: centuries and then kind of eventually just closed the gate
Speaker 1: and walked away, shut the door, and not at all. Maybe,
Speaker 1: but much of the spent fuel produced in the entire
Speaker 1: United States would be in one facility ninety miles from
Speaker 1: Were there any other plans you heard? Were there any
Speaker 1: other proposals you heard for what to do with spent
Speaker 1: fuel that you were excited by the youth thought were
Speaker 1: worth investigating. In a lot of ways, the best alternative
Speaker 1: is probably to leave it where it is, you know
Speaker 1: it really, I mean there are some places where you
Speaker 1: don't want to keep it, you know, the probably Indian Point,
Speaker 1: which is close to New York City. Um, so some
Speaker 1: of the fuel you want to move, You want to
Speaker 1: get it into maybe another location. Um, but you know
Speaker 1: they're really it's you know, it's like it's it's there there.
Speaker 1: You're not saying that just as a practical political concern.
Speaker 1: I mean, let everybody share in the risk. You think,
Speaker 1: for for from an engineering standpoint, from a physics standpoint,
Speaker 1: it's better to leave it there. Yeah, I think it
Speaker 1: is right now. I mean, we certainly in supporting it
Speaker 1: is dangerous. Transporting it adds risk, and we just we
Speaker 1: don't have any place to put it so right now
Speaker 1: it can end up in containers and putting at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the ocean doesn't work. You know, I'm not
Speaker 1: in favor. You could do it, You could do it
Speaker 1: would center, Yeah, it would eventually leak, and eventually will
Speaker 1: I mean all containers you put stuff in the exception,
Speaker 1: there's there's nothing you can make that's gonna that's essentially
Speaker 1: forever last for millennia, which is what you need, is
Speaker 1: what you need. Yeah, that's interesting. So you are working
Speaker 1: with Read for four years and you're working on yuck
Speaker 1: A Mountain for four years most of the four years
Speaker 1: or the most of the four years. When you leave Read,
Speaker 1: where do you go to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to
Speaker 1: do what I started out as a commissioner. So there's
Speaker 1: five people that make the decisions for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Speaker 1: Um I was one of those five. It was a long,
Speaker 1: hard fight by Senator Reid to get me on that
Speaker 1: on that hard because I was viewed. Um I had
Speaker 1: worked for Senator Read and before that, when I was
Speaker 1: the fellow I worked for now Senator Ed Markey. Um well,
Speaker 1: there you go. That kind of not going to make
Speaker 1: friends in any industry, certainly too cozy with Ed Markey.
Speaker 1: I learned a lot from him, and then I went
Speaker 1: to work for Senator Reid, who is almost the exact
Speaker 1: opposite personality, but they're both equally effective, just in completely
Speaker 1: different ways. And so I kind of went to the
Speaker 1: NRC with what I kind of called the scarlet and
Speaker 1: for nuclear because I worked for two of probably the
Speaker 1: biggest antagonists to the nuclear industry in a way, uh,
Speaker 1: Senor Read because of his opposition to yuck him outain
Speaker 1: and now Senator Markey because of his strong advocacy for
Speaker 1: nuclear safety. Uh. And so there was a lot of
Speaker 1: resistance to me joining the nuclear reactor viewed as someone
Speaker 1: who was not pro industry, and industry obviously exerts a
Speaker 1: lot of pressure not just on the regulations that are
Speaker 1: passed by the NRC, but the enforcement of those regulations.
Speaker 1: And then of course they influence who's on that commission
Speaker 1: exactly or they try to exert some influence on that.
Speaker 1: So what they do they really do so uh, they're
Speaker 1: very influential in working with senators to giving money to
Speaker 1: campaigns and and just these are positions that are they
Speaker 1: are nominated by the President and then confirmed by the Senate,
Speaker 1: so you have to get the okay of of enough
Speaker 1: of really a majority parts group of people. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And so you were a commissioner at the NARC for
Speaker 1: how long? For about four years? And during that time,
Speaker 1: what was something that struck you as particularly troublesome or
Speaker 1: dramatic or noteworthy while you're on, Well, we were really
Speaker 1: dealing then with a lot of still a lot of
Speaker 1: the legacies of the nine eleven attack and nuclear security now, right,
Speaker 1: so now the security issue comes popping to the four
Speaker 1: if you will you and it was two thousand five,
Speaker 1: so it was still about four years after, so it's
Speaker 1: royally now by the time you get in there, exactly.
Speaker 1: But what struck me is how long it was taking.
Speaker 1: And you know, a lot of ways I would have
Speaker 1: thought that, Okay, you know, problems were identified right after eleven,
Speaker 1: and those problems should have been fixed within a couple
Speaker 1: of years. But one of the things you see in
Speaker 1: this industry is that everything takes longer and longer and longer.
Speaker 1: And some of that is is just because the industry
Speaker 1: understands that if you delay things, the public outcry goes down,
Speaker 1: the interest among members of Congress goes down because they
Speaker 1: have a shorter attention span than a lot of institutions,
Speaker 1: and so you know, as time goes on, the impetus
Speaker 1: and the will to make reforms relaxes. So the longer
Speaker 1: you can take to do things usually the better off
Speaker 1: it will be for for the industry. And so I
Speaker 1: was surprised by how long this was still going on
Speaker 1: and how many things were still needing to be done.
Speaker 1: It was really my first exposure to this idea that
Speaker 1: you know, the industry is is going to have access
Speaker 1: and they're going to make argument, and you know they're
Speaker 1: not unreasonable arguments, but they're not always necessarily, in my view,
Speaker 1: consistent with where is the industry? Where are they right?
Speaker 1: Where we're anti nuclear advocates think they're wrong, Where do
Speaker 1: you think they're right? I think they are. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that they're right, and I'm not sure that they're wrong,
Speaker 1: but they have a fair point about the cost of
Speaker 1: what they're doing. And the way I always looked at
Speaker 1: my jobs, what in terms of the realities of um,
Speaker 1: you know, if they're gonna if we're gonna require them
Speaker 1: to modify the plant, it's going to cost a certain
Speaker 1: amount of money. That money is going to be charged
Speaker 1: to the people who buy their electricity, and it's going
Speaker 1: to raise electricity rates. So that's a legitimate, in my mind,
Speaker 1: concern on their part because there are companies of a
Speaker 1: public service Commission issue, though exactly it's never the issue
Speaker 1: for the NRC, and that was always where I drew
Speaker 1: the line. While they may make those arguments, that's not
Speaker 1: really the argument that the NRC is responsible for them
Speaker 1: passing on the coast rate pairs and not your issue. Exactly,
Speaker 1: it's not urg But you know, when you go and
Speaker 1: testify in front of Congress and a senator complains about
Speaker 1: how their electricity rates are going to go up and
Speaker 1: they're hearing from the utility, it's because of the NRC.
Speaker 1: There's that subtle pressure for the industry is passing on
Speaker 1: the buck to the NRC and saying that they're because
Speaker 1: you're demanding that they do exact safety things. Yea, the
Speaker 1: average reactor was licensed for what period of forty years initially,
Speaker 1: and some of them, forgive me an example of someone
Speaker 1: who's extending that least far beyond forty years. Almost every
Speaker 1: plant in the country they want what they want another
Speaker 1: twenty and now they're starting to ask for another twenty
Speaker 1: beyond that, So to go up to eight, I think
Speaker 1: that's too long. Um, I really do. I think you're
Speaker 1: starting to push the boundaries of equipment and material degradation
Speaker 1: and just the performance is going to suffer. And we're
Speaker 1: seeing that. I mean, we know that that that's happening,
Speaker 1: and that's why you're seeing plants shut down. You know,
Speaker 1: they say it's because electricity rates are so low because
Speaker 1: of natural gas and um, but it's really a combination
Speaker 1: of that, combined with the fact that they have to
Speaker 1: make modifications to the plant because they're getting old. So
Speaker 1: I never think this issue of economics, it's it's never
Speaker 1: separated from safety. It's always very very closely related to safety,
Speaker 1: because the reason nuclear power is expensive is because of
Speaker 1: all the safety systems you need to make it safer.
Speaker 1: Are there models on the drawing board that are smaller
Speaker 1: and safer? There there are models that are smaller. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure that anybody has actually produced a detailed design
Speaker 1: that's safer. But when you build them smaller, you start
Speaker 1: to really run out of a use for them, and
Speaker 1: it's almost like building. You know, somebody's saying, well, you know,
Speaker 1: long haul semis um they get much better gas mileage
Speaker 1: if they were a lot smaller. And they would say
Speaker 1: the size of a pickup truck, but you can't haul
Speaker 1: as much cargo with a small pickup truck as you
Speaker 1: can with a big semi. So four years as a
Speaker 1: commissioner from two thousand nine, and then what happens? Then
Speaker 1: I became chairman. Okay, now did that happen? Uh? So
Speaker 1: Senator reid Um advocated and lobby the president and Obama
Speaker 1: is president. That's right, President, that's the only way you're
Speaker 1: getting in right, Yeah, that's right. Um. Yeah. And then
Speaker 1: I became a chairman. And and then what did you
Speaker 1: want to do when you became chairman? Your agenda? Uh?
Speaker 1: Improved safety? Uh specifically how restores flooding things like in Nebraska?
Speaker 1: Addressing those issues? You know. I actually the first thing
Speaker 1: I did as chairman as I sat down and I
Speaker 1: took a bunch of staff together in the agency, and
Speaker 1: I said, tell me what we need to do. What
Speaker 1: are all the issues that we need to work on
Speaker 1: and we need to folk they knew, and I came
Speaker 1: up with actually this really long plan. Who was your predecessor?
Speaker 1: It was a man named Dale Klein. He was appointed
Speaker 1: by President Bush pro industry, pro industry, Okay, absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: And so I was here. I was this um you know, really,
Speaker 1: if anything, you could characterize me as agnostic about nuclear
Speaker 1: technology and put in this position now to lead it.
Speaker 1: Was the youngest chairman in the history the agency. And
Speaker 1: my first job was to ask everybody what we should
Speaker 1: do for safety? And I tell you it caused a
Speaker 1: lot of waves. Um. Why because people didn't want to
Speaker 1: know the answer. Uh. My colleagues on the commission who
Speaker 1: were um Bush appointees, which uh the Republicans? Um, there
Speaker 1: were essentially two at the time when I started as chairman.
Speaker 1: Two Republicans typically are five, yeah, but because of the problems,
Speaker 1: it sometimes gets down to fewer than five. And so
Speaker 1: when you when you were on the board, yeah, you
Speaker 1: were one of three. Yes, I was one of four,
Speaker 1: and then very quickly another left. And so then when
Speaker 1: I became chairman, Um, the other two were Republicans, the
Speaker 1: other Bush appointees, and they were not happy with you
Speaker 1: being elevated to chairman. I was naive about that, UM,
Speaker 1: and I knew there was a lot of opposition to me, UM,
Speaker 1: But I just chalked it up to the It's just
Speaker 1: the process. It's a game. It's a game. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: the back and forth in the tussle and the tug
Speaker 1: of war and then you know, and if you play rugby,
Speaker 1: then you shake hands. Yeah, because these guys really didn't
Speaker 1: want to shake hands with They did so far want
Speaker 1: to rip your arm off. They haven't yet wanted to
Speaker 1: shake my hands. So and they and when I was there,
Speaker 1: and the first thing then was I had the audacity
Speaker 1: to kind of come up with a list of things
Speaker 1: that we needed to focus on. And do you actually
Speaker 1: wanted to be the chairman of the of the nuclear
Speaker 1: regulatory I wanted to be. So you had the audacity
Speaker 1: to try to regulate the nuclear and you had a
Speaker 1: list of things. And what was the most problematic for them?
Speaker 1: What was the one that they just couldn't believe? What
Speaker 1: took your hand that you were a communist? I think
Speaker 1: it was tone more than anything. But it was just
Speaker 1: talking about we knew the list of things they were present.
Speaker 1: I'll give I'll give you an example of a story. Um. So,
Speaker 1: one of the first things that happened when I when
Speaker 1: I started as chairman um the agency had been reviewing
Speaker 1: the design for a new reactor for a very long
Speaker 1: time a reactor by Westinghouse. So it tended to be
Speaker 1: a new design that would be built and in fact
Speaker 1: is being built right now. But the staff was having
Speaker 1: some problems, usual the agency employees, the kind of the
Speaker 1: nuts and bolts, the workers in the in at the NRC,
Speaker 1: and they were worried because there was a safety problem
Speaker 1: they thought with this, with this plant, and they wanted
Speaker 1: it fixed. So they came and they sat down to
Speaker 1: my office and they said, you know what, we're we're exasperated.
Speaker 1: We can't get Westinghouse to listen to us. They won't
Speaker 1: make changes. We're at our wits end. We're going to
Speaker 1: send them a letter that essentially says, if you don't
Speaker 1: change things, we're don We're not going to review this anymore.
Speaker 1: We don't think it's safe. I said, great, I'll support you,
Speaker 1: I'll back you up. Let's do a press release. So
Speaker 1: we did this. We issued the press release, and then, um,
Speaker 1: I think it was a week or so or a
Speaker 1: couple of days later, I was going to a big
Speaker 1: industry conference, and uh, it was I thought a very
Speaker 1: important conference. I gave a speech, talked about a number
Speaker 1: of safety issues. But I walked in. There's always a
Speaker 1: reception before that, and I walked into the reception. It
Speaker 1: was almost like I was Moses and the sea had parted.
Speaker 1: All the industry people just looked at me and kind
Speaker 1: of moved away, exactly and um, and then slowly, you know,
Speaker 1: I would mingle and people would come up to me
Speaker 1: and talk to me, and because at the end, they're
Speaker 1: all just people. But basically what I heard was, you know,
Speaker 1: we didn't have any problem with if you having the
Speaker 1: staff send this letter to Westinghouse. We actually thought it
Speaker 1: was a good idea because you know, some of the
Speaker 1: folks in the industry, we're thinking Westinghouse wasn't main attention.
Speaker 1: But what they said was, but why do you have
Speaker 1: to do a press release? Why do you have to
Speaker 1: make it public that there was a problem. And to me,
Speaker 1: that was just a reflection of the kind of the
Speaker 1: relationship that had developed where problems were not talked about.
Speaker 1: It's not an as need to know basically exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're one of us. We need to keep this quiet.
Speaker 1: We're working up between, you know, behind closed doors ourselves. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: to know that's what people in your position do exactly.
Speaker 1: And that was what I what I was told I
Speaker 1: was flabber gas. Transparency was something that was important to you,
Speaker 1: very important public having in some knowledge and also a
Speaker 1: knowledge that you were doing your job exactly. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: that's what I told him. I said, you know, I
Speaker 1: have a responsibility to this agency. Why is it okay
Speaker 1: when we do when we issue you a license to
Speaker 1: build a plan, do you want a big public ceremony,
Speaker 1: But when we you know, have a concern of the responsibility. Now,
Speaker 1: this was how early on in your tenure. This was
Speaker 1: very early, within the first couple of months. And then
Speaker 1: be things unraveled. Is it's safe to say. I think
Speaker 1: what really started to create the problems was when the
Speaker 1: Fukushima nuclear accident happens. But this is yeah, and this
Speaker 1: is in two thousand eleven, UH and UM there's a
Speaker 1: major nuclear accident in Japan, and uh I got thrust
Speaker 1: into responding to this as part of the US government's team,
Speaker 1: and the NRC became really a big player in in
Speaker 1: dealing with this accident, and we made a number of
Speaker 1: decisions about what people should do Americans in particular in
Speaker 1: Japan and UM, they were a little bit more conservative
Speaker 1: decisions than what the Japanese government was saying for their people,
Speaker 1: and that that created some blowback. The first thing that
Speaker 1: I said was that Americans need to stay fifty miles
Speaker 1: away from that reactor. And um, in the United States,
Speaker 1: we don't tell people to stay fifty miles away from reactors.
Speaker 1: We tell them in an emergency essentially have to plan
Speaker 1: to stay about ten miles away. And that's a big
Speaker 1: problem because you take a plant like Indian Point, which
Speaker 1: is about thirty five miles from where we are here. UM,
Speaker 1: that's well within fifty miles. So that started to create
Speaker 1: this I can imagine. What was happening was that all
Speaker 1: my colleagues on the Commission were getting calls from the
Speaker 1: industry saying, what's he doing? Why is he doing this?
Speaker 1: And this was not a decision that I that I
Speaker 1: made with my colleagues on the Commission, was done in
Speaker 1: my role and responsibility as chairman. I started getting questions
Speaker 1: from senators, very pro industry senators, why was I not
Speaker 1: telling my colleagues on the Commission what I was doing,
Speaker 1: which I was telling them, And so just spiraled into
Speaker 1: this this chaos of of confusion and innuendo and their hearings,
Speaker 1: and there are hearings, there's a congressional hearing. Who who's
Speaker 1: the chair of those hearings? Darryl Issa actually chair to
Speaker 1: hearing UM about my management style at the NBC so which,
Speaker 1: you know, if you think about all the useful ways
Speaker 1: that Congress can spend its time trying to understand how
Speaker 1: the nfrc's managed, doesn't seem to be one of to
Speaker 1: have a trial and to be person created by Daryl.
Speaker 1: When I watched this documentary which shows this hearing, and
Speaker 1: it actually shows a view from where the congress people
Speaker 1: looked down to the witnesses, and I was one of
Speaker 1: the witnesses, and that was the first time I ever
Speaker 1: saw what I looked like during these hearings, because of
Speaker 1: course I'm not watching my face, and I'd never gone
Speaker 1: back to look at a TV broadcast or anything. And
Speaker 1: I when I saw the documentary for the first time,
Speaker 1: I was shocked. I realized I didn't have a good
Speaker 1: poker face at all. And I was just I was angry,
Speaker 1: I was confused, I was outraged, offended um the accusations
Speaker 1: that were being made about me, and and and really
Speaker 1: the triviality of the whole thing that at the end
Speaker 1: of it, there were conflicts over policy, and in a way,
Speaker 1: those were difficult conflicts, but they were conflicts in a
Speaker 1: way we were supposed to have because these were serious
Speaker 1: issues and a serious accident and happened. Then they accused
Speaker 1: me of um. Probably the worst accusation was that I
Speaker 1: was abusive to women, which was just so ridiculous that
Speaker 1: I couldn't even fathom that somebody would say this about me.
Speaker 1: I mean, to me, it was just farcical. It was hard.
Speaker 1: I had I had a group of sixteen personal staff
Speaker 1: that kind of worked directly in my office, and none
Speaker 1: of them corroborated them, of course, and and half of
Speaker 1: them were women. But that was the low point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was definitely the low point. Yeah, yeah, But you resigned.
Speaker 1: I resigned then that following summer, So this happened around
Speaker 1: Christmas or in December two thousand eleven, and then I
Speaker 1: resigned in June of two twelve. Was that hard for
Speaker 1: you to do? It was very hard for me to do.
Speaker 1: But did you feel it wasn't the best interests of
Speaker 1: the organization? Is that why you did it? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: did it. It It was it was incentive Read's best interests,
Speaker 1: because he still had an interest, I think, in trying
Speaker 1: to help make sure that the NRC was doing its job.
Speaker 1: And he came to me and suggested that then might
Speaker 1: be a good time to really step down. And I
Speaker 1: realized at that point I had done a lot. I
Speaker 1: had gotten in a set of reforms after the accident,
Speaker 1: and this is also what generated a lot of the opposition.
Speaker 1: I was very aggressive in pushing for reforms. We got
Speaker 1: a group of people at the NRC to do a
Speaker 1: study of what we needed to fix, and it was
Speaker 1: in my mind a very very reasonable answer that they
Speaker 1: came up with, UM, and I pushed to get that
Speaker 1: full report implemented. And of course, you know, the industry
Speaker 1: chopped at a commissioner's chopped at, and everybody kind of
Speaker 1: tore it apart. UM. But I pushed and we got
Speaker 1: a lot of that done. And so once once I
Speaker 1: had done that, you know, there, I felt you would
Speaker 1: accomplish something. I had felt I had accomplished something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it was it was time. Now you have a
Speaker 1: unique vantage point from your job and from your career
Speaker 1: at the overall picture of energy in this country, and
Speaker 1: where do you see this country twenty and thirty and
Speaker 1: fifty years from now in a doable way, not some
Speaker 1: pie in the skyway. Where do you see us ending
Speaker 1: up energy? Was what's going to happen to our energy picture.
Speaker 1: It's going to be more localized, and it's going to
Speaker 1: be more renewables. We build really big power plants, and
Speaker 1: then we build really big transmission lines, and we ship
Speaker 1: all that power where we need it to homes to businesses.
Speaker 1: I think what's going to happen over time is that
Speaker 1: more and more electricity is going to be generated at
Speaker 1: your home, in your local community. It's it's going to
Speaker 1: be cheaper, it's more resilient from a security standpoint, it's
Speaker 1: more resilient against natural hazards. Battery storage will be a
Speaker 1: big piece of it. I mean, one of the activity
Speaker 1: will get better. But one of the things that's really unique,
Speaker 1: if we don't think about yet, is that, let say
Speaker 1: everybody starts driving their cars with electric cars. So one
Speaker 1: of the things you can do, you drive your car
Speaker 1: all day, it charges up the battery. You get home,
Speaker 1: you plug that car, and now you're not necessarily charging
Speaker 1: the battery from your home, but using the battery as
Speaker 1: kind of a buffer to back up your electricity at
Speaker 1: home when maybe you're the sun is not shine anymore,
Speaker 1: the wind is not blowing anymore, and so you've got
Speaker 1: this potential, this massive fleet of batteries that's going to
Speaker 1: be out there. Uh, and you can use that. So
Speaker 1: I think the systems aren't really there yet, but we're
Speaker 1: getting close. And I think with the rapid pace of
Speaker 1: technological change, we can't even envision yet how we're going
Speaker 1: to have electricity in the future. I really think that.
Speaker 1: But I think we're not going to have it the
Speaker 1: way we have it now. And the the analogy I
Speaker 1: always think about as I think about hot water, right,
Speaker 1: you you could easily have designed our entire water system
Speaker 1: so that you have big power plants that make hot
Speaker 1: water and ship that hot water in pipes to your
Speaker 1: house and you turn on the hot water and the
Speaker 1: hot water comes out. But that's not the way we
Speaker 1: did it. The way we did it is we built
Speaker 1: hot water heaters in the home, so when you turn
Speaker 1: on the water to get your hot water, it's being
Speaker 1: produced locally and uh. And again the key being, we
Speaker 1: don't have to achieve saturation where every sphere in the
Speaker 1: country is covered by what they can, they can produce.
Speaker 1: All you have to do is knockdown consumption. All we
Speaker 1: have to do is knock down oil consumption, and then
Speaker 1: what a triumph that would be. We don't have to
Speaker 1: replace it. We're never gonna be replacing were never. Do
Speaker 1: you agree? Yeah? Yeah, I mean if you think about
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide limits and greenhouse gas limits, we're not talking
Speaker 1: about getting to zero carbon dioxide emissions, we're talking about
Speaker 1: reducing by So you don't have to completely replace some
Speaker 1: of these older technologies. You just have to replace a
Speaker 1: portion of them. Gregory Yasco is finishing a book on
Speaker 1: nuclear power and working to create a company to develop
Speaker 1: offshore wind facilities. This is Alec Baldwin and you were
Speaker 1: listening to here's the thing