Chernobyl

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision-making. I'm here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and this week we've got a special guest with us, Tom Plant, and this week we're discussing averting the apocalypse. Nick, if you can lead us in and perhaps introduce us to Tom, who I presume is an expert in how

Speaker B: 00:00:34

we're safe now than we did in: 1986

Speaker C: 00:02:26

How can I possibly live up to that introduction? I always get nervous when people describe me as an expert. I prefer specialist because it implies that I focus very narrowly, but have no necessary skill level. Okay, so I'm the Director of... Your ignorance is narrow. My ignorance is narrow. That's right. But my interests are broad. And so here we are. I'm the Director of Proliferation and Nuclear Policy at RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, which is a think tank in London. And we just do defence and security issues. And I run one of the research programmes there, which really does, you know, nuclear weapons, the spread of them, and, you know, capabilities in different states, things like that. My personal specialty is issues around North Korea, but also cover things on Iran, arms control,

Speaker A: 00:03:05

and so forth. And what's your background? Before all that, how did you get into this whole proliferation, the whole nuclear game? He sold nuclear arms to rogue states.

Speaker C: 00:03:13

Well, I do kind of think from time to time that I could possibly make an alternative career as an arms dealer. But you know, that maybe comes after this podcast. So yeah, I mean, as Nick said, I have a, you know, physics background, which slightly shames me, because I'm very much a generalist in that respect. Even within the discipline of physics, I'm a generalist there. And a lot of what I've spent my time doing, and I do now really is trying to translate between the scientific, the policy and technology worlds, right, to try and make sure that the implications of things that are happening that are, you know, fundamentally very, about science and engineering and so forth, that have policy impacts in the nuclear domain are understood properly and responded to in a way that makes sense from a technical perspective. And you know, vice versa, you know, turning that around too. So that kind of technology policy translator role is quite often what I and people like me find myself playing. Okay, great. Nick, I think you'll go for it.

Speaker A: 00:04:06

I think you might have questions you want to ask of Tom. Yeah, could Chernobyl happen again?

Speaker C: 00:04:12

Well, I mean, let's kick off with that one. If I remember rightly, and I should have checked this before I came here. But if I remember rightly, so the design of the reactor at Chernobyl was quite an interesting one. I think there is one remaining in the world of that particular type. And one of the reasons that the Chernobyl reactor design is interesting is because it has this kind of positive feedback loop thing, right? So when it starts running out of control, that particular reactor design has a tendency to just keep going. Unless you don't want that, right? You want it to be the other way around. Exactly. Yes, that is definitely the case. And modern reactors very much have that designed in that sort of negative feedback thing. So as it happened in Chernobyl, no, that wouldn't happen. But you know, there's clearly risks of nuclear accidents of different kinds. Things that we saw in Fukushima, for example, was very, very different case, far fewer people died as a result of the nuclear accidents. But you know, things can still happen,

Speaker A: 00:04:59

of course. Sorry, so let's just actually just take this back a little bit and give ourselves a bit of a platform here. Can we talk about well, what did go wrong with Chernobyl? And what did go wrong? You mentioned Fukushima there as well and talk about the differences there. Because I think that helps better answer whether that could happen again or not. Do we agree? Hmm. Okay. Yeah. I mean, although people can just watch the TV show. Well, I want to,

Speaker B: 00:05:22

maybe in a very abridged version. But well, I don't think I think Tom, I mean, he's given you the bare bones of it there. I'm not sure. There was something about positive feedbacks.

Speaker C: 00:05:32

Yeah, right. So the reactor design thing, okay, I'm not going to go into the details of it. One, because I don't actually remember them. And two, because people might want to watch the show like me, I haven't seen it either. And that's probably going to be from what Nick said, the best refresher I could possibly have. But basically, during what reactors have a number of different elements, right, they have the fuel, the nuclear fuel that sits in there. And that's sort of generating all the heat, that kind of thing. They have a thing called a moderator. And they have coolant and stuff, which makes sure that the coolant, you know, serves two functions. One, it makes sure that the reactor doesn't get too hot, start melting or burning, whatever. And it has another function, which is that as the coolant heats up, you know, it's that heat that's used to drive turbines, you know, create steam, drive turbines, create electricity.

Speaker B: 00:06:14

I mean, as I understand it, the nuclear fuel is just heat, right? That's all we want it for. In the same way, it fills the same function as coal in a coal-fired power station. All we're doing is taking that heat and effectively spinning a turbine and generating electricity. It's as simple as that.

Speaker C: 00:06:29

Basically, yeah, it's all sort of massive heat transfer. It's just the energy density in uranium is so much greater than coal.

Speaker A: 00:06:35

Right, Chris?

Speaker D: 00:06:37

Yeah, I mean, I suppose for me, the interesting thing is the level to which you can remove the ability for human error to mess things up. So to what extent are nuclear accidents in general caused by people doing the wrong thing? And therefore, no matter how you evolve the systems, somewhere you're always going to get a person pressing the wrong button in, you know, whatever sequence it is.

Speaker C: 00:07:13

It's a really interesting question because there's two kinds of human involvement roughly that you can think of. One is the kind of prompt involvement, right, where a human action, the kind that you're talking about, pressing a button is the proximate cause of some crisis that develops, right, some threat state that develops. And there's another kind of human involvement, which is at the design stage, you know, how do you make sure that your design, yeah, you're trying to design in this negative feedback thing, which we can come back to in a bit if you want to, you know, this idea that if a reactor goes into an unsafe state, somehow that that's transient and it has a tendency to return to a safe state that it almost always will ideally. But if you get that design process wrong, then that is a kind of human error as well. So, you know, you've got those two kinds of things. To the latter, that kind of prompt human error, modern reactor designs are really about taking that out as much as possible. So human intervention is always, should always be the very, very last line of defence and ideally not required at all. In terms of designing them in the first place, that is an interesting one, because then you're into the space of well, how do you anticipate all possible threats and failures when some of them can be external. So you go to the Fukushima case, for example, modern nuclear reactor, well, modern-ish, but it had this kind of feature that it would have a tendency to return to a safe state. But the fallback systems that were used were knocked out by the tsunami. So it was a threat that exceeded what we call the design basis threat. It was beyond the scenarios that the designers had envisaged. And whether you interpret that as human error or an acceptable probability of failure is another, you know, that's a consideration, right? Yeah, I mean, and it's

Speaker B: 00:08:44

interesting trying to separate those things apart with, in the case of Chernobyl. And again, I'm going largely, I mean, almost entirely on the TV programme, plus a little bit of follow-up reading. But is that, you know, by itself, actually the actions kind of, with a safe reactor, the humans couldn't have caused a meltdown. And if the humans, at the same time, if the humans had been following the procedures they were supposed to be following, and had had a bit more of an understanding about what was causing the reactor to behave like it was behaving, then they wouldn't have done the things that they did. So I think, you know, my characterisation of the kind of design decision process would be, well, yes, in these kind of extreme circumstances, this could happen. But luckily, we have these procedures which tell people the sequence in which they should do things. And for example, so when it was at low power, which was part of the problem, because apparently it wasn't burning enough, it wasn't heating enough to get rid of xenon quickly enough, so it wasn't coming up to power, something like that. And then, of course, once the last bit of xenon disappeared, suddenly it got very, very hot all at once. They should have, instead of letting it run on at low power, they should have turned it off altogether and completely rebooting or whatever the correct term is. You know, and that was what they should have done. So in a way, the Soviets were taking the kind of cheap approach, which was design a slightly dodgy reactor, but assume your procedures will compensate. And of course, they didn't imagine, or at least plan for, people not following the procedures. And that's, you know, what do you do

Speaker D: 00:10:21

then? I think for me, looking at those two things that you're talking about there, Tom, the sort of the design error and the response error or whatever, or the sort of, you know, activation error, there are two things I'm kind of quite interested in your views on. One is, you said, you know, it was for Fukushima, there was a potential classified design error in that it didn't withstand a set of circumstances that actually happened. But you talked about, you know, the tolerable risk. And one thing that really struck me about the Chernobyl disaster that came through from the program was just the consequences of what could have could have happened. There's a meeting scene where they talk about what might happen. And at that point, I mean, I had no idea of that at the time I was, you know, 12 years old or something. But you start to think, oh, you know, that's the upper level of what could have gone wrong was obviously enormously

Speaker B: 00:11:23

catastrophic. So just to be clear, for Tom's benefit, that was if the corium had melted through to the water, then they could have superheated, it caused a thermal explosion, which could then have destroyed the other plants in the same facility and then, you know, infected the groundwater and scattered fallout over an even bigger area. Explosions are bad.

Speaker D: 00:11:47

Yeah, explosions in nuclear, you don't like them, they're bad. But so, yeah, you know, it was the number of people and the geographical space it would have affected and so on. But what I'm interested in is, so with Fukushima, when they are trying to make those calculations about, OK, so we know the probability of a tsunami coming in of this height is pretty low, right? They must have made some calculations about, but it happened, so it wasn't that low, right? But anyway, you know, they'll be able to get a handle on that. But the upper scale in terms of the impact, the damage, the bad stuff that can happen as a consequence, I'm quite interested as to how that gets modelled. And then the other thing, which you can hopefully pick up on, is the human error in operating a system. I'm interested how much autonomy is getting into that now and how much sort of adaptable intelligent autonomy is getting in and what that means for us.

Speaker C: 00:12:45

There's a lot of different things there. Yeah, sorry. No, it's all right. I think about, let's just briefly on the Fukushima thing, because there is an interesting point there, which is there was, I mean, whether you characterise it as error or not, one of the interesting things which led to some of the explosions, not of the reactor, there were hydrogen explosions, really. The reactor design had spent fuel ponds. So when the reactor, you know, when the fuel comes out, it's extremely hot, right? And it's also very radioactive. So you basically leave it in a pool for a while to cool down. And that's on top of the reactor in the Fukushima design, in the four reactors that were there, I think it was actually more than four, but there were four next to each other in those famous pictures on TV. And you saw like the plumes of hydrogen explosion coming out the top, which was basically gas from the breakdown of the cladding and things like that. And hydrogen gas. And those pools on top of the reactor had been overfilled. And they'd not been overfilled outside the design basis, but beyond the original. So it'd been all regulatory qualified, all that sort of stuff, but they were more full than they had originally been planned to be. So there were some excursions, what would be called in safety land excursions from the original design base. But the key thing that happened with Fukushima is, that could potentially have been anticipated. I don't know whether the tsunami of that magnitude was within the design basis threat portfolio. Again, that's probably a term we should come back to. Whether or not it is, what it caused was a common mode failure, where the same threat case knocked out both the system, the primary system and the backup system. And that is a design error. That's

Speaker B: 00:14:18

nearly all. Chernobyl was quite unusual because it was purely human driven, but nearly all of the great disasters of history have involved what subsequently seemed to be a design fault, interacting with an extreme kind of event. What would now be considered a design fault,

Speaker C: 00:14:39

that idea that as it heats up, that the cooler becomes less effective, that the reactor becomes

Speaker B: 00:14:48

more reactive. I have the phrase positive void coefficient in my brain, but I don't know what it means. But I guess Chernobyl needn't have happened at all. They didn't have to do this thing. Whereas the sort of classic Titanic situation, where it is designed to be robust against almost every kind of iceberg strike. It just so happens that the one that it wasn't designed for, is the one that it hits. And of course, then they don't have enough lifeboats. Well, it seems like they didn't need them. And same with Fukushima. They're kind of conscious that this is a potential thing, and they've designed out the things that could go wrong, except for the thing that actually does come along and happen. It seems like a very common confluence of things that actually you can't really tell if something is a design fault or an acceptable design risk. Because you can't ever make everything 100% safe. Right. So I think it's quite hard. I mean, if the Titanic had truly been unsinkable, then lifeboats were a waste of money. So I think there's a question here in my mind about what the risk is. And that's where I want to put a controversial thing to you and you can change your mind. Nuclear meltdowns are not a big deal. Change my mind.

Speaker C: 00:16:08

Well, they are if you're close to them, I think. Where are you going with this?

Speaker B: 00:16:13

Even your Chernobyls and your Fukushima's have not actually killed very many people. And even when they've followed up to try and look at increased cancer rates and stuff, there's nothing there. Birth defects, no evidence. So I reckon we are overly cautious. I think we're much more scared of nuclear accidents than we should be. And we're much less scared of conventional forms of power station than we should be. And it's a good trade off for what you get. I mean, can you convince me that nuclear accidents could be really bad? And if so,

Speaker C: 00:16:47

what is that? I feel like a TV series. If that's not going to do it, my attempts at sort of mangling two minutes of pop culture together for you aren't gonna. But you know, there is honestly, there are some interesting sort of cognitive bias things going on here about how people deal with nuclear, right? There's the effect heuristic thing going on, people overestimating some of the risk of something, which they have a strong emotional response to. And obviously nuclear, you know, when you say nuclear meltdown or explosion or whatever, you don't just think about Fukushima or Chernobyl, you think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are two extremely, you know, extremely different cases. And none of almost none of the effects that you saw happen to the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be evident as the result of a meltdown of the kind that was sort of

Speaker B: 00:17:30

So just very briefly, because that might put a lot of people's minds to rest.

Speaker C: 00:17:35

Quite the opposite usually.

Speaker B: 00:17:37

What I mean is like, like, I think a lot of nuclear people say, look, stop talking about nuclear power as though it's in any way related to nuclear weapons, totally different technologies. I mean, is that true? Or is that actually a bit of a, you know,

Speaker C: 00:17:49

they've got a common basis, but they are very different. So the common basis is relying on splitting a nucleus and atoms nucleus to release energy. And to be honest, that's where the similarity ends. You know, the whole point of a nuclear reactor is you're releasing energy gradually, slowly over time, in a controlled way. And yes, obviously, it has broken down in cases. The purpose of a nuclear weapon is to do entirely the opposite to release a lot of energy very, very quickly in a briefly controlled and then very, very much uncontrolled way over over a short period of time. And the ways that you achieve that are pretty different, that you're trying to achieve something called the critical mass, which is basically when you get self-sustaining chain reaction. But again, in reactors, the way that you design that is quite careful. So in a nuclear weapon, you're trying to get something called supercriticality, which is where you're over the critical mass limit by many, many times, right? You just want to go get as many splitting nuclei as close together as possible. So they can all trigger each other off. And you can use as much of your material very, very quickly as you can. With a nuclear reactor, you're actually aiming to be slightly subcritical most of the time, and to rely on something called, well, it's basically some neutrons cause fissions to happen faster or slower than others. And you're basically looking at lag time to get you up to criticality. And what that means is if you sort of stop that process, the natural lag in the system will cause it to stop, stop working. It's very different sort of design principle is this

Speaker B: 00:19:10

kind of negative feedback. And we're not we're not having to, I mean, let's say if a power plant just stopped operating right there. And then nothing would happen, right? We're not we're not having to intervene perpetually to stop it going critical in some way.

Speaker C: 00:19:23

No, correct. And everything, every modern design is about making sure that happens. And more to the point, making sure there are circumstances which even if they, you know, let's say somebody tries to fly a plane into a nuclear reactor or drives a truck full of explosives into a reactor building, or if you're in a submarine and you have to turn upside down for some unthinkable reason, you know, is gravity going to move control rods or cause in a different difficult way. And that's all designed in to make sure that under those kinds of circumstances, that you wouldn't get that kind of effect. By the way, when you're talking about rebooting a reactor earlier on, there is a term for that. It's called a scram. Just an emergency shutdown, basically, or very quick shutdown is called a scram. So there you go. It probably stands for something which I

Speaker B: 00:20:00

can't remember. But there you go. Worth a Google. Yeah. Um, yeah, I mean, I yeah, that that so that makes sense. So I mean, yeah, because it's obvious that, you know, when even when things go horribly wrong, like at Chernobyl, and the oil and fuel ends up as a kind of, you know, big molten mass, and it's all snuggled up together in the same place, that it still isn't behaving is still

Speaker C: 00:20:22

giving off energy quite slowly. Well, no, actually, it's, I don't want to minimize it. You know, it's pretty serious when that kind of thing happens is, yeah, but it's miles. It's in it's, it's orders of magnitude away from a nuclear bomb, from a small nuclear bomb. One of the reasons why even anything like that, right. And one of the reasons why Chernobyl was so destructive was because it was it was about the graphite core fire. And it was about the way that the radioactive particles, you know, there was the, you know, the fission issue. But there's where the radio, where the radioactive particles are sort of interacting with the soot effectively from this raging graphite fire that then just billows up and over, and really creating a source of fallout effectively, without the nuclear weapon that would initiate it, but you don't have, you don't have the flash damage, you don't have burns, you don't have what, you know, what they call prompt gamma, prompt beta, all that sort of stuff, the radiation poisoning effects that you would get from a, it's a different kind of radiation poisoning. So you were getting that in Chernobyl, but not the same way as you would, as was observed in in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Speaker B: 00:21:20

Right, you haven't, you haven't changed my mind. I now think nuclear, nuclear accidents are not to be laughed off.

Speaker C: 00:21:26

Well, no, you're right. Nuclear accidents are not to be laughed off, but they are correctly, you know, the point is the frequency and severity of them should be set alongside the frequency and severity of accidents in other equivalent technologies. So you're looking sort of person accidents per unit energy generated, right, that would be a sensible kind of metric to think about. And prompt casualties from say, Fukushima from, I think more people, well, obviously, clearly more people died in the Tohoku, it's fun. It's interesting that we call it Fukushima. But really, we should call it Tohoku, because that's the name of the tsunami. And many more people were killed in that. But more people died in I think it was a gas refinery explosion, if I remember rightly. So clearly, obviously doesn't get the press, but I think that was about 40 people, something like that. Yeah, prompt casualties. Now, obviously, we don't know what the delay casualties might be from Fukushima radiation. But you know, it seems likely that it will be, you know, some way below, well, clearly below the

Speaker A: 00:22:17

Tohoku tsunami casualties. Chris, you were about to ask something, but also we've, we're sort of groping our way towards the end here. So if you if there's anything you want to sort of, you know,

Speaker D: 00:22:27

let's go towards that. Yeah, I suppose I'm interested in sort of understanding the primary threats then coming from, you know, nuclear, nuclear power at the at the moment. And, you know, whether those are based on, you know, natural disaster, or kind of nefarious human activity, what you know, what is the nuclear industry, kind of most, most worried about? Gosh, I'm, I have to

Speaker C: 00:22:58

say, I wouldn't be able to give you a ranking, but I would be able to give you a list of things that obviously natural disasters, because of the Fukushima experience are right up there. Terrorism is clearly, you know, is clearly one. And I think probably the insider threats with as a subcategory within that, considering that, you know, there is a lot of consideration, this idea of design basis threat that I that I mentioned earlier, is basically you come up with a portfolio of things that you want your reactor to be able to deal with that your system to be able to deal with. And having an insider, you know, you can kind of sort of throw that in as part of it, but it really does start to subvert your understanding, it's a kind of modifier to a design basis threat that really does throw a spanner in the works for that kind of systematic analysis. So I would say that sort of thing is really worrying, if you're looking at disrupting the operation of a reactor, so that it did something of the kind that, you know, you saw dramatized for the Chernobyl series, or, or in Fukushima, that again, is going to be difficult for design issues, but you know, diverting or disrupting or detonating, you know, trying to spread radioactive contamination, perhaps, or increase fear, frankly, you know, that sort of

Speaker B: 00:23:59

, no, sorry, one out of every: 1000

Speaker D: 00:25:55

Because that's what I was getting with the with the Chernobyl question was, you know, what is what is the upper end of what could happen, but it sounds like, maybe not, maybe not too bad. But I mean, I guess, like the, the geographic location of these things is quite rare, because obviously, the Soviet Union was a big, they could just bus people off, you know, 500 kilometres away, and it wasn't a problem. They're well used to moving their populations, right? If we have one in our country, you know, the exclusion zone is going to contain most of the country. So, you know, is there a danger with using them in, you know, areas of high, high sort of population density? Should we just sort of stick them all in Canada?

Speaker C: 00:26:49

I don't know how the Canadians, the Canadians actually have a vibrant nuclear industry, probably fine. I mean, I don't know, I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to underestimate. So when you said nuclear accidents aren't necessarily severe, I mean, it's the combination of probability and outcome that, you know, that that I would agree with you on the individual accidents themselves are clearly very serious and have in a way that, you know, fossil fuel renewables, etc, don't have significant long term cleanup consequences. They're just, you know, well,

Speaker B: 00:27:17

they kind of do, but we seem happy with them. Are you talking about climate change? Yeah,

Speaker C: 00:27:22

right. Okay. But I'm talking about sort of response to an accident, right? So yeah, I agree with you on that. But response to accidents sort of stuff, that is something you'd have to take into account. But if you're thinking about, sorry, go again, Chris, what was that? Just whether or not,

Speaker D: 00:27:36

you know, well, there's obviously more risk if you put them by population. Yeah, no, you're

Speaker C: 00:27:41

right. Yeah, clearly. I mean, one of the interesting, I mean, you can, one of the interesting things to look at, for example, is local planning information around Portsmouth, you know, Devonport Dockyard, and that sort of thing for this isn't a, you know, this isn't a power reactor. This is because it's a submarine base. So clearly, they have to have response plans in place. It's a major city, you know, nuclear reactors generally aren't, you know, power reactors are near population centers required to, you know, staff them, but not

Speaker B: 00:28:08

major ones. But that one's kind of... The question is, could it render Portsmouth any more uninhabitable

Speaker C: 00:28:13

than it already is? Apologies to all our listeners. I want to disassociate myself from this dissing of

Speaker A: 00:28:20

Portsmouth, which I hope to visit again someday. We need to bring things to a conclusion fairly soon. I've just got perhaps a question I should have asked at the beginning, which is a very basic question. How does it work, the nuclear power plant design industry? How does it work in terms of public sector, private sector, in terms of competition? It doesn't really. In terms of how does this, how does, I was about to say the Soviet Union, how does Russia do it? How does UK, and what's the sort of general state of that industry at the moment? Well, you know, you're

Speaker C: 00:28:54

asking me a great time, because yesterday I was running an all day conference at my organization, and one of the presentations there dealt with exactly this question. So I'm going to steal from Thomas Davies. Thank you, Thomas. I appreciate you. And this is your citation. So I mean, there's an interesting thing here, right, which is that the UK, for partly EU reasons, partly ideological reasons, has chosen not to go for state backing nuclear power in a very sort of explicit way, you could argue that the very high strike price for power at Hinkley is a form of state backing kind of by the backdoor. But it isn't, it isn't, you know, underwriting it providing costs up front. Whereas Russia, China, etc, even France, for example, are much more willing with state backed companies in the case of Rosatom, the Russian one entirely state owned companies to provide financing up front and a complete package, which just makes it much more attractive. So there are attempts to, I mean, I think there's an open question as to whether nuclear power is genuinely a market, or whether it really is sort of geopolitical competition, geoeconomic competition between, between states using these sort of powers as a proxy for influence. If you saw a nuclear powers of proxy for influence, I think there is a case there, you know, our government's chosen to go one way, which I think is proving to be the wrong one. I think if you're going to do nuclear power in the UK, or with a nuclear design, you basically have to front up the costs if you want to do it. So we've either going to have to stop charging our iPhones so much, and cut our energy consumption really very dramatically, or we're going to have to, you know, make and I mean, very, very dramatic, it's not just sort of, but it's kind of total lifestyle change, it's just not going to happen. If we want to fill that gap, it is probably nuclear for the foreseeable future until, you know, hopefully, that's imagined renewables or cleaner energy are able to fill

Speaker B: 00:30:36

that in a more sustainable way. Is it plausible to think that if we invested in nuclear energy as much, I mean, and I'm assuming, I mean, obviously, nuclear energy isn't renewable, in the sense that there must only be we can't create new nuclear fuel, right? Yeah. But so I mean, I mean, but is it plausible to think that there are, are there potential I mean, from a physics standpoint, are there potential efficiency gains to be had? I mean, how efficient are nuclear reactors? How efficient could they be? I mean, because I know that, you know, in terms of capture of energy, you know, even the best sort of photovoltaic cells are still what we might think of as pretty inefficient, you know, it's still only a percentage, I think, you know, 10 20%, or something of, of the incident light is being converted efficiently into electricity. How far could we go with nuclear? Or is it pretty as efficient as efficient as it gets? Well, I mean, yeah, I mean,

Speaker C: 00:31:31

you'll always try and run a reactor so that you get every last ounce of juice, as it were, out of the fuel, but there's more you can do, you're talking about the sort of stages of energy transfer, every time you transfer energy from one form into another, you kind of lose something along the way, right. And so what you could do is you could think of having, at the moment, we have gas cool reactors, the gas is the medium that sort of transferring heat around that kind of thing, you could go for something even hotter, because heat efficient transfer is much more efficient at high temperatures, like liquid sodium, for example, and that might be the next

Speaker B: 00:32:01

generation. So you have some sort of spooky glowing liquid instead of water? Well, you

Speaker C: 00:32:05

wouldn't be able to look at it, right? You know, it would be it would be concealed. But you would do another thing, potentially, like you would what you would have a what they call an actinide burning fuel cycle, which is to cut over a long sort of technical explanation that I would probably muff is basically looking at the waste product from one reactor and using it to power

Speaker A: 00:32:23

another one near enough. Just before we finish off, just on a slightly lighter note. Hang on, I haven't made my surprising claim. Go on, make your surprising claim. I'm going to say that

Speaker B: 00:32:33

nuclear energy is great in terms of its consequences, is greener than renewable energy. Greener. Citation needed. The Chernobyl exclusion area. Well, it's now it's now a lush wilderness, full of full of, you know, animal species that are returning to Europe. And full of two headed deer. No, it's not because there isn't any it's it's bulls. There's no there now aren't any mutant animals. They're all doing really, really well. And and that wouldn't have

Speaker A: 00:32:59

happened if it hadn't been for good old nuclear. And that brings me nicely on to actually what I wanted to ask, which is have you been to Chernobyl? I have not. Bam. The reason I the reason I ask is really frustratingly, I'm about to go to Ukraine in about three weeks from now. And one of the things I thought about doing was going off to Chernobyl and doing a little photo project. But first of all, you know, everyone's suddenly talking about it. Ukraine's the big thing. Tourism has shot up. And and actually, I even saw there was a great photo essay in the Guardian on this on Chernobyl. So you know, just kind of dashed my hopes of just being that different guy who goes to yeah, sorry, it's really in now. Right? Yeah. I well, there you go. I'm high to fashion. So I was gonna ask for some advice for visiting Chernobyl, straight to Ukraine. That's no good. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's very disappointing. Other thing, completely different. I often like to ask our guests this. If you weren't what you are, what would you be? What would you be doing?

Speaker C: 00:33:58

Oh, gosh. Well, if I had the ability, behavioral psychologist, something like that. And if I didn't have the ability, probably a salesman. I don't see why. I mean, if you can master nuclear

Speaker B: 00:34:10

physics, psychology is a social science. So there's not even hardly any people to. Yeah. Okay. So

Speaker A: 00:34:20

chat before we finish off with Tom, is there anything you'd like to ask? Is anything you'd like to sort of round up on at all time? I mean, no, I'm now feeling you know, feeling happier

Speaker B: 00:34:30

than ever about smug. Yeah, about going and playing with some radium or something because I feel

Speaker C: 00:34:35

completely. Yeah, don't do that. I will say this is probably one of the first experiences I have where the people I'm speaking to about nuclear issues leave the room happier than they did. So if you'd like we can do North Korea and the effects of nuclear weapons.

Speaker A: 00:34:47

Okay, let's quit while we're ahead. Okay. All right, gentlemen. Thank you very much indeed. You've been listening to the Cognitive Enduring podcast with myself Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. But a special thanks to Tom Plant, our special guest this week. Thank you very much for joining us. You're very welcome. Okay. Thank you. Goodbye.