Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio. Man,
Speaker 1: welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Noria with you
Speaker 1: along with Robert Jubri and his latest work is called
Speaker 1: The Case for Nukes. Robert, let's wrap up about Chernobyl,
Speaker 1: jump over to Fukushima, then talk about the positive aspects
Speaker 1: here at home. So Chernobyl is just rendered useless for
Speaker 1: twenty thousand years. Well, no, Chernobyl reactor was destroyed. But
Speaker 1: if you want to know, once again, there's frankly no
Speaker 1: evidence of much harm from the fallout from Chernobyl. They
Speaker 1: may have been some, but very little. In fact, the
Speaker 1: area around Chernobyl right now, because it was evacuated by people,
Speaker 1: is now one of the richest wildlife reserves in Europe
Speaker 1: because the animals love the fact that the people have
Speaker 1: moved out and they're doing just fine. It's now inhabited
Speaker 1: by giant buys, in wolves, all sorts of animals that
Speaker 1: people thought were extinct in the area have gone and
Speaker 1: recolonized it. The radioactivity has destroyed the area. Nope, that's interesting,
Speaker 1: all right. Two thousand and eleven Fukushima, what about that situation, Well,
Speaker 1: Fukashima is very interesting. And by the way, after Fukushim,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about there's only three nuclear accidents
Speaker 1: of consequence of Fukashima, churnobil and three my line. We'll
Speaker 1: get to that one in a minute. Okay. But Fukushima,
Speaker 1: of course, an entire city was destroyed by an earthquake
Speaker 1: and a tidal wave in twenty eight thousand people were
Speaker 1: killed by drowning or falling buildings and things of this
Speaker 1: kind not and three reactors were destroyed. Okay, but not
Speaker 1: a single person received a dangerous radiological dose. Not a
Speaker 1: single person outside the plant gate got any radiological dose
Speaker 1: of any significance whatsoever. So if you want evidence for
Speaker 1: nuclear safety, sure Fukashima is it is if you can
Speaker 1: have a natural disaster that destroys the whole city and
Speaker 1: three nuclear power plants and no one is harmed by radiation.
Speaker 1: I mean, it doesn't get much safer than that. If
Speaker 1: that had been an oil refinery, you would have caused
Speaker 1: fires all over the place, and it would have been giants,
Speaker 1: smoke clouds, I mean, you name it. If that had
Speaker 1: been a chemical plant, there's all sorts of things that
Speaker 1: could have been that would have caused all sorts of harm,
Speaker 1: but nuclear power plants. No. Is there something to be
Speaker 1: said about building power plants by earthquake faults? Yeah, you
Speaker 1: shouldn't build power plants by earthquake faults. But I do
Speaker 1: want to talk about actually what, in certain ways is
Speaker 1: the most famous nuclear accident, which is the one that
Speaker 1: happened in art Country at three Mile Island in Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine. Right right, now, here's the thing. Okay,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned, it's a scientific fact, and it cannot
Speaker 1: be contested that a pressurized water reactor cannot have a
Speaker 1: runaway chain reaction. And the people Ralph Nater used to
Speaker 1: say they could, they're just lyne But the more educated
Speaker 1: environmentalists would acknowledge that this is so. However, they'd say,
Speaker 1: but there's a different danger, which is that the nuclear
Speaker 1: power plant accumulates radioactive waste in its fuel elements. And
Speaker 1: even though you can turn off the nuclear reaction in
Speaker 1: a millisecond by dropping in the control rods or if
Speaker 1: the water is removed, their chain reaction shuts down. Okay,
Speaker 1: what will happen inside of a millisecond is the power
Speaker 1: level of the reactor will drop from one hundred percent,
Speaker 1: not to zero, but to seven percent, because their decay
Speaker 1: products are still producing that much heat. Now it will
Speaker 1: then go down in a few hours to one percent,
Speaker 1: but for a few hours it'll be given off substantial heat.
Speaker 1: And if the coolant isn't there, the fuel is going
Speaker 1: to melt. You'll have a meltdown. And they said it
Speaker 1: will not only melt the fuel, the fuel will melt
Speaker 1: its way through the eight inch thick steel pressure vessel
Speaker 1: that contains the reactor, and then it will melt through
Speaker 1: the containment building eight feet thick, and then down through
Speaker 1: the earth to the center of the Earth, and then
Speaker 1: somewhat unscientifically, it would then proceed up to the other
Speaker 1: side of the Earth to China. And this was called
Speaker 1: the China syndrome. And coincidentally, there was a movie of
Speaker 1: that title about such an accident that occurred the very
Speaker 1: same month as the three Mile Island accident. Now, what
Speaker 1: happened to three Mile Island was there's an operator error
Speaker 1: and they drained the coolant out of the reactor, and
Speaker 1: because the coolant was out of the reactor, then fission
Speaker 1: reaction shut down. But yes, there was the k heat,
Speaker 1: so the fuel elements did melt, but they did not
Speaker 1: melt through the pressure vessel and the containment building and
Speaker 1: through the earth and all the way to China. They
Speaker 1: didn't even melt all the way through the pressure vessel.
Speaker 1: They melted their way about one inch into the eight
Speaker 1: inch thick steel and then they stumped and that was
Speaker 1: the end of it. And there was a small amount
Speaker 1: of radioiodine what had be vented that exposed the people
Speaker 1: in the area to the same radiation dose they would
Speaker 1: have gotten if they had spent the weekend in Colorado,
Speaker 1: because the background radiation here is higher than Pennsylvania. That's
Speaker 1: how the smallest three mile island is the only mega
Speaker 1: disaster in human history in which no one was hurt. Okay,
Speaker 1: So it's purely a propaganda thing. And this whole thing
Speaker 1: is discussed in depth in the book The Case for Nukes.
Speaker 1: Now back home, let's talk about the power of new power.
Speaker 1: Do you believe it's clean? It's clean? Okay, And well
Speaker 1: let's start at the beginning here. What's the biggest problem
Speaker 1: that we have on this planet today? I say it
Speaker 1: is poverty. You know, we have poverty here in America,
Speaker 1: but the average American income is fifty thousand dollars a year.
Speaker 1: The average income on planet Earth is ten thousand dollars
Speaker 1: a year. Okay, big difference, and get a load of this.
Speaker 1: Half of the Earth is below average. So the average
Speaker 1: is ten thousand, and there are people making five thousand
Speaker 1: and two thousand, okay, and nothing. But then they don't
Speaker 1: stay alive very long. But this is a huge problem
Speaker 1: that affects billions of people. Billions of people suffer from
Speaker 1: malnutrition and their bodies are weak and subject to disease
Speaker 1: for their entire lives. Or their children have to go
Speaker 1: to work, and so they can't get any education and
Speaker 1: they have no future. And you could go on and
Speaker 1: on about this, but this is what our world is
Speaker 1: actually like today. Okay, this is the problem. Well, if
Speaker 1: you there's a direct proportionality between energy use and living
Speaker 1: standard because everything that you use and everything that is
Speaker 1: made for you, and everything that is transported to you
Speaker 1: to use it all involves energy. And if we're to
Speaker 1: raise the whole world to the aren't American standard living
Speaker 1: and once again we still have poverty here. But just
Speaker 1: to get to that level, will have to increase human
Speaker 1: energy consumption five times, five times, and that doesn't even
Speaker 1: take into account population grows, so maybe ten times. Okay. Now,
Speaker 1: so these people say, well, we want to replace fossil
Speaker 1: fuels because of the carbon emissions, they're not even addressing
Speaker 1: the right problem because first of all, you can't replace
Speaker 1: fossil fuels with windmills, even at the current level of
Speaker 1: energy consumption, let alone replace them and increase our energy
Speaker 1: production five times over. But you can with nuclear energy
Speaker 1: because nuclear energy represents an energy resource as vastly greater
Speaker 1: than fossil fuels, as fossil fuels are compared to horses
Speaker 1: and sailing ships. Okay, the fossil fuels revolutionize the world,
Speaker 1: and fossil fuels, by the way, they don't want to
Speaker 1: save the environment. You know who save the whales, Rockefeller? Okay,
Speaker 1: because the whales will be hunted for their oil. But
Speaker 1: when we got petroleum oil, then they didn't have to
Speaker 1: go after the whales anymore, and the whales were saved.
Speaker 1: And there's a lesson there because we were going after
Speaker 1: a resource that plays a much smaller role in the
Speaker 1: biosphere than the whales do, or forests. Cutting down forests
Speaker 1: and they're going drilling for oil has much lower environmental
Speaker 1: impact than cutting down forests. Okay. Well, nuclear power is
Speaker 1: even more remote from the resources that are used by
Speaker 1: the biosphere. There are no animals or plants that make
Speaker 1: use of nuclear power, unlike the fact that they make
Speaker 1: use of trees and so forth. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: if you want to preserve the natural, you've got to
Speaker 1: create the artificial, and that's what nuclear does. And just
Speaker 1: to give me an idea of this, the amount of
Speaker 1: any block of granite like buildings are made of, or
Speaker 1: mountains are made of, okay, contains two parts per million
Speaker 1: uranium at eight parts per million thorium. And if you
Speaker 1: took the energy in that uranium and thorium in a
Speaker 1: pound of granite, it has the same energy as one
Speaker 1: hundred pounds of oil. Okay. And if we go to
Speaker 1: fusion power, we we're using the deterium in water. A
Speaker 1: one gallon of water equals three hundred and fifty gallons
Speaker 1: of gasoline. That's how much energy we're talking about. We're
Speaker 1: talking about releasing energy that could power humanity at a
Speaker 1: thousand times its current energy level for a billion years. Robert.
Speaker 1: There was a nineteen seventy five book by John Fuller
Speaker 1: called We Almost Lost Detroit. I was living in Detroit
Speaker 1: then at that time I talked about the Fermi one
Speaker 1: new Clower plant in Monroe, Michigan, which was a southern
Speaker 1: suburb of Detroit, that happened in nineteen sixty six, another
Speaker 1: meltdown that was a huge story. Then. Yeah, that's also
Speaker 1: discussed in the book The Case for Now. We have
Speaker 1: in fact that that reactor, which was damaged in a
Speaker 1: partial meltdown, was subsequently returned, repaired, and operated through the eighties.
Speaker 1: Uh the v UM. So once again, this is panic literature. Okay, Now, look,
Speaker 1: what's the real problem that we face? Well, yeah, but
Speaker 1: I'm telling you that there is a real problem that
Speaker 1: we face, okay. And the thing that we can't use
Speaker 1: carbon fuels is a variant actually of the previous argument
Speaker 1: that the environmental has had, which was that we were
Speaker 1: going to run out of farm fuels. But back in
Speaker 1: the early seventies, late sixties, they we're putting out all
Speaker 1: these books saying we're going to run out of everything,
Speaker 1: and that's why we have to stop economic growth. Okay,
Speaker 1: And then they switched it around and say, now the
Speaker 1: problem is that we're not going to run out of
Speaker 1: fossil fuels, and that's why we have to stop economic growth. Okay,
Speaker 1: But either way, what they're trying to do is stop
Speaker 1: economic growth, and stopping economic growth is aboarding the future.
Speaker 1: Stopping economic growth is sentencing billions of people for the
Speaker 1: rest of human history to have to live in poverty.
Speaker 1: That's what it is. And so look, you know, and
Speaker 1: they talk about how there's too many people, we got
Speaker 1: to get rid of people. Well, we're not in danger
Speaker 1: because there's too many people. We're in danger from people
Speaker 1: who think there are too many people. Okay, And you know,
Speaker 1: the as I mentioned earlier, I was originally a nuclear engineer,
Speaker 1: and in the eighties I would debate people from the
Speaker 1: Sierra Club and they would talk about, we have to
Speaker 1: stop economic growth because of all the pollution, and we're
Speaker 1: going to run out of fuel. And I said, well,
Speaker 1: nuclear power creates no pollution and we'll never run out.
Speaker 1: And they would say, we hate that. And I couldn't
Speaker 1: get that. Why do they hate nuclear power when it
Speaker 1: solves all the problems they're talking about. And then I
Speaker 1: realize that's exactly why they hate nuclear power. They hate
Speaker 1: nuclear power because it would solve a problem they need
Speaker 1: to have okay, And that's all discussed in the case
Speaker 1: for nukes as well. It talks about where these people
Speaker 1: are getting their money, It talks about their ideological motivations
Speaker 1: and and and the problem that they create for the
Speaker 1: rest of us by really they're they're using these purported
Speaker 1: problems of resource scarcity and pollution for an agenda, which
Speaker 1: is to basically say that there isn't enough to go around,
Speaker 1: so human numbers, activities, and liberties must be severely constrained. Okay.
Speaker 1: And that's why they hate nuclear power, because it takes
Speaker 1: away their fundamental premise. It says that reason horses are unlimited,
Speaker 1: so human numbers, activities, and liberties do not need to
Speaker 1: be constrained. And quite the contrary, it is, why do
Speaker 1: we have nuclear power. We have nuclear power because of freedom.
Speaker 1: We have nuclear It was America that invented nuclear power
Speaker 1: through its scientific creativity and inventiveness, which is a product
Speaker 1: of freedom. Freedom creates resources. They say, in order to
Speaker 1: live without resources, we must courtrail freedom, I say, And
Speaker 1: what nuclear power says is in order to create resources,
Speaker 1: we must have freedom. If you had your way, how
Speaker 1: many power plants would we have in the country well
Speaker 1: to meet our cart if we wanted to, Well, look France,
Speaker 1: it's seventy five percent nuclear, ten percent hydroelectric, fifteen percent
Speaker 1: fossil fuel. Okay. If we had continued building nuclear power
Speaker 1: plants at the rate we were building them in the
Speaker 1: early seventies, we would be like that today, and instead
Speaker 1: of having one hundred nuclear power plants, we'd probably have
Speaker 1: around four hundred, okay, and that would do the job.
Speaker 1: That would pretty much we would be essentially decarbonize the
Speaker 1: electric grid. And the only major country, by the way
Speaker 1: to decarbonize their electric grid is France. Okay. Germany, which
Speaker 1: is run by environmentalists, and they say, oh, where so green?
Speaker 1: We love our forests, so we hate nuclear power. Germany
Speaker 1: produces five times the carbon emissions as France per unit
Speaker 1: electricity produced. And it's even worse than that because a
Speaker 1: lot of their carbon emissions they're getting from burning down forest.
Speaker 1: They say, it's so natural, We're getting our electricity from
Speaker 1: natural wood. Well, that's called killing trees and killing the
Speaker 1: animals that live in the trees. You're not a friend
Speaker 1: of nature. If you get your electricity by burning down trees.
Speaker 1: You're a friend of nature. If you get your electricity
Speaker 1: by splitting atoms. It's pretty remark Coblas do it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know that's what I say, is you know
Speaker 1: Savortree splitting at him. Listen to more Coast to Coast
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