Arnie Gundersen and Grayson Webb appear on CCTV, December 7, 2016

Claims that atomic power reactors are the solution to global warming are simply attempted rebranding efforts by the nuclear power industry to make people believe nuclear power is a "clean" way of generating electricity. Listen to CCTV host Margaret Harrington of Nuclear Free Future interview Fairewinds Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen and Research Assistant Grayson Webb to discuss how the atomic power industry tries to sell the world its false narrative that it helps reduce Global CO2. In this interview, Arnie and Grayson discuss Fairewinds 18-month research endeavor that found using atomic reactors would reduce CO2 emissions only 6% by the year 2050 and cost more than $8.2 Trillion! Renewable and sustainable energy sources are much cheaper and will also boost the US economy as it creates real jobs in America.

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Transcript

English

MH: Welcome viewers to our ongoing Nuclear Free Future conversation here from the Center for Media & Democracy in Burlington, Vermont. I’m your host, Margaret Harrington. And viewers, let’s welcome our special guest to my right is Grayson Webb from Fairewinds Energy Education. Welcome, Grayson. Thank you for coming. And welcome back, Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer from Fairewinds Energy Education. Happy Holidays. It’s hard to believe we’re at the end of 2016, one of the longest years in history. Almost over. But we’re beginning also a new push for putting – first of all, the title of our program is Nuclear Power Makes Global Warming Worse. And what I was going to say, Grayson, is that we’re at the beginning of a new push to make nuclear power the alternative to the global warming. And this you both claim is wrong and saying that the nuclear solution to climate change is a smoke screen. So can you start off with what you mean by that – this smoke screen?

AG: Let me start. This has been an 18-month process. I was asked to give a speech at Northwestern last April – not a couple of months ago, but the year before. And I contacted two global experts, a guy named Amory Lovins, who everybody might know, and another guy named Michael Schneider. And they sent me 60-page Power Point presentations each, and I turned those 120 Power Point slides into a 20-minute no-slide presentation at Northwestern that had half a million people read about it in Forbes Magazine. So I guess I did a pretty good job. But I realized there’s a lot of data there. So Maggie contacted the University of Vermont and we asked for some student interns to help crunch this enormous amount of data into a real cogent report. And we picked up four students – senior interns – and Grayson was one – and a good message there for viewers – student internships can turn into jobs, because Grayson is now an employee. And they ground numbers for 3-1/2 or 4 months to get an ironclad argument on how much carbon dioxide is created, how little nuclear power actually prevents and all of that analysis was done by student interns like Grayson. We also had Bob Harindeen of Burlington – a Vermonter; and Les Cannon from Johnson State. Two Ph.D.’s the Fairewinds Crew and four student interns working for the better part of a year to come up with the presentations we’ve been giving lately.

MH: So we started with the conclusion that the nuclear solution is a smoke screen. And it’s a smoke screen for what? What trick is being played on us?

GW: Well, basically, nuclear is just not cost efficient. Renewables are much more cost efficient and can be built in a much shorter time span than nuclear can. And so they’re just trying to latch on to whatever thing they can to make themselves seem feasible.

MH: Are they saying that nuclear power does reduce the CO2?

GW: (3:52) Well, they’re saying since it doesn’t put out any CO2, it is a green source of energy.

MH: And is that true, that nuclear –

AG: There’s no argument that you’ve got a small change in CO2 downward. It improves CO2, but at what cost? And that’s really where the work of the interns was at. We discovered that in 2050 – 35 years out, the nuclear industry wants to build 1,000 new nuclear power plants. That’s one nuke every 12 days for 35 years. How much would that cost? It turns out it’s 8 trillion dollars. And those thousand new nukes would reduce carbon dioxide by 6 percent. That’s it. 6 percent. So the point we tried to make and what Grayson was alluding to, is this issue of – it’s a lot of money over a long time and you could be doing other things with that money. It’s called an opportunity cost. Economists call it an opportunity cost. There’s better ways to spend it quicker that would have a quicker impact on reducing CO2 gases and a more dramatic impact, too.

MH: So are you saying that some organization – what organization is it that is putting out this information that you have challenged? What organization?

AG: World Nuclear Organization is a European based umbrella group for all the nuclear power owners. And they’ve said a thousand nukes are needed to help the climate change issue. And James Hanson (?5:38) who’s the CO2 guy who came from NASA in 1988, identified global warming and CO2 buildup as the direct linkage between them. He says 2,500. So that would be a nuke every 4 days for the 35 years if we want to meet Hanson. Well, we used the World Nuclear Association (sic) number and 1,000. And we used an investment bank’s cost and we came up with 8 trillion bucks. That’s a lot of money no matter how you count it. And for what? And it was a 6 percent improvement in CO2. Why do we want to spend that amount of money when, as Grayson said, we’ve got renewables and they can be built faster and cheaper.

MH: And Grayson, is it true that our CO2 level is going up every year no matter what we do?

GW: Yeah. Currently because the CO2 basically it takes awhile for the emissions to get into the atmosphere and it’ll take awhile for it to stabilize even after we stop producing emissions. So even if we stop today, the rates will keep climbing for a little bit.

MH: And what is the main reason for this? Is it development – like developing nations, that sort of thing? Is it the improvement in our – what we have – our appliances and all of that sort of thing? A better standard of living?

AG: Yeah, you know, if we Americans go to solar, there’s still a pent up demand in India and Southeast Asia and Africa that want to live like us. And if they start to build coal plants, CO2 is going to go up. There’s a study at M.I.T. that says in the best of circumstances, CO2 is still going to double in the next 35 years, even if you implement a thousand new nuclear plants and renewables, because of this pent-up demand. Everybody wants a car worldwide and everybody wants a house that has heat and how can we blame people for wanting to live the way we do as Americans? So it’s important, then, to try to not nip the demand, because I think everybody has a right to live the way we do, but to change the paradigm that the energy is produced, and that’s really what we’re talking about.

MH: (8:10) So Grayson, tell us, what was your first approach when – first of all, are you still in the university now? Are you –

GW: I’ve since graduated this last spring.

MH: Congratulations. What degree?

GW: Environmental science with a concentration in ecological design.

MH: Okay. So this was all right up your alley. So what was the first step? Was it getting people together with you or what?

GW: Well, for one of my senior classes, Arnie and Maggie came in and – actually, Caroline, a former employee, came in and gave a brief interview – a talk discussing what they needed from us. And me and three other students all decided that really sounded like an interesting arrangement. Personally, I was kind of on the fence about nuclear; I didn’t really know what I thought about because of obviously it doesn’t produce CO2 but you have all these risks associated with it. And so I really picked up on this assignment as a way to better inform myself. And so three other interns and I started at Fairewinds and Arnie got us started right off the bat and gave us a ton of really great information and gave us a lot of oversight.

AG: There’s one number that everybody agrees on, and that’s the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Back in 1960, this really bright guy in Hawaii decided he’d better start measuring CO2 in the atmosphere. And it’s called the Mauna Loa data. Mauna Loa is a place in Hawaii where the data has consistently been taken. And so we know CO2 was about 320 parts per million in 1960 and it’s now over 400 parts per million in 2015. So that’s good numbers. There’s no doubt that that’s the case. The crazy thing we found is nobody knows how much CO2 we’re throwing up every year. You’ve got all these smoke stacks, all these cars, all these sources – thousands and thousands of sources, and nobody has a monitor on every source. So the amount of CO2 that’s getting thrown up in the air took us about a month to figure it out. And it’s 35 thousand million tons of CO2 every year goes up into the atomosphere. 35 thousand million – it’s called a gigaton but I like to think of thousands of millions – a huge number. And what did we have, like 10 sources to figure that out?

MH: (11:01) Can you give us some idea of how you did figure it out?

GW: It was just a lot of research on line looking through academic papers. And then, of course, you have to check the reference to see if it’s unbiased or not. And so basically what we ended up doing is I believe we found several that seemed appropriate and then took an average based on those.

AG: So that was the first step was finding out how much we throw up every year. Then there’s a good study out of M.I.T. that talks about whatever we’re at, it’s almost going to double because of this pent-up demand in the developing world. That was the second piece. And the third piece was figuring out how much nuclear could save. And for that, we went right to the nuclear industry. And it’s interesting. There’s a case of bias. When the American Nuclear Trade Group called NEI talks about how much carbon dioxide their power plants are saving, they use the dirtiest coal. And nobody builds a dirty coal plant any more but they always compare to the dirtiest coal plant. But the World Nuclear Association compares to the cleanest gas plant. So when you use the World Association number you get half the amount of CO2 that nuclear plants save that the Americans do. So everybody’s trying to spin a number. And the last piece was cost. And there we found an investment bank. And they don’t have a dog in this fight. It’s money to them. And it’s Lazard, which is an investment banker. And we took the number of power plants times the cost that the investment banker said the power plants would cost, and we came up with $8 trillion to make a 6 percent improvement in global warming. Why are we doing this?

MH: Grayson, what surprised you the most from – in your learning curve as you dove into this – what was the most surprising thing?

GW: I guess the most surprising thing was just how much cheaper wind power was compared to everything and we factored in a capacity factor, which is the amount of time the energy source is able to actually produce energy. So for wind, it’s – the wind doesn’t blow all the time, so it has a 40 percent capacity factor; nuclear is about 90 percent. And so even factoring that in, wind is almost half as much as nuclear to get the same goal.

AG: You’ve got a power plant now being proposed in England and it’s going to cost $28 billion. And of course, the English coast is very windy, and the output from the windmills would be four times cheaper and the British government is so locked on buying these nuclear plants that they’re absolutely confusing to consider the windmills. And those nukes would come on line in about 2030. And you could slap up the windmills in the next five years. So you can make an immediate dent in CO2 and you can do it cheaper. Why wouldn’t you want to do that? And the reason – and this is why the smoke screen – because somebody’s making a boatload of money.

MH: (14:29) And who – what is that?

AG: It’s a nuclear consortia. The American names are General Electric and Westinghouse, but in fact General Electric is owned by a Japanese firm, Hitachi, and Westinghouse is owned by Toshiba. So they come to Congress and they appear to be an American company but all these components are made in Japan and South Korea and China. So when you hear about yeah, they may be expensive but it’s good American jobs, that’s not true. All that work is going to Japan and Korea and China. So they are international consortia that are lining up for trillions of dollars in handouts.

MH: And the more nuclear plants are being built in Asia? Not South America?

AG: There’s about 40 right now being built over there. And out of – the world has 450. So less than 10 percent more nuclear power plants are being built. Now Vietnam just pulled out. They were going to build a half a dozen nuclear power plants and they said this is too expensive. So good for the Vietnamese. And the Taiwanese just pulled out. They’re not going to build any new nukes. And of course, the Germans are phasing back. So a lot of countries that were projected to go nuclear are not. And I hope it’s our message that’s getting through, but it makes no economic sense to build a new nuclear power plant.

MH: Is there a difference, Arnie, between countries that were – say, in India, I know it’s the government that finances the new nuclear power plants. But in the other countries, like in Germany and – well, any of the South American countries, is it small companies or nuclear companies who finance it and not the government?

AG: You know, that’s the key. We have socialized the risk of nuclear by having a government say, we’ll buy it. Because they’re going to spread out these cost overruns to millions of people. So it’s in those socialist and communist countries that we’re seeing the most nuclear: Russia, China, where top down the leadership says we’re going nuke and we really don’t care what the people want. But in the countries that are somewhat democratic – and we’re calling Vietnam a somewhat democratic country now – the people are saying this doesn’t make sense. And the leaders are getting the hint. Most interesting example is South Africa. The leadership in South Africa is quite corrupt and they want nuclear power and the odds are, they’re making huge payoffs in the process. But the people in the country are saying exactly what we are – this makes no sense. And the finance minister actually quit in South Africa. And he said, I am not going to have my name on a nuclear power plant. This makes no economic sense. So when Wall Street has to take the risk, nobody’s building it. But when a government stands behind it and Wall Street doesn’t have to take the risk, at that point, people are building nukes, but not many. About 30.

MH: Well, Grayson, this is true investigative reporting. Here you are, you’ve launched yourself while still a student. And you’re getting into a whole big scientific world but also you’re going through the process of how to investigate it. So tell me some of the intriguing things about that. And also working with the others – the other interns.

GW: (18:30) Definitely. It was really interesting to be able to use the nuclear world’s own data to back up our own argument. So I think if you can – sometimes you feel like you should just avoid their information entirely sometimes just so you don’t – it can be frustrating or it’s biased so you don’t want to look at it – but if there’s a crack in their argument that you can find, then that just strengthens your argument all that much more. So it’s very important to diversify your background and where you’re looking. And working with the other interns was a really great opportunity. We really bonded well together and I think we put together a really great argument.

MH: It’s staggering, too, Arnie, because in all of your investigation of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, you found out that there was a lot of obfuscation or lying that was going on and that was both frustrating and a challenge to you.

AG: That’s another case where a government – the Japanese government – wants these nukes to start back up. So they’re fudging the numbers. They’re creating – we just saw it – I was in Japan in 2012 and I said it’s going to cost you a half a trillion dollars to clean this plant up. And finally now the Japanese government is agreeing, it’s going to cost almost half a trillion dollars. They didn’t want to say that back then because they didn’t want to frighten their people about trying to start up these plants that had been shut down. But we see it everywhere. The government and the nuclear industry are in cahoots.

MH: Arnie and Grayson, we’re going to have to wrap this up in a few minutes because we’re going to lead into the two-minute documentary called Smoke Screen that you put together. And we’re very excited to show this on Channel 17 at the end of this program. But I’d like you to share with us some more of your insights into working with Fairewinds and why it’s important to get the message out, because for our viewers, they’re like me, people who are interested – we want to live in a good way and we want to be informed. So could you tell us something about your insights after this first year?

GW: It’s really changed my outlook on nuclear. As I said, I kind of came in with a neutral viewpoint, but after seeing all this data, it’s just really opened my eyes to the direction we need to move in in order to quickly counteract climate change. Making new nukes – it’s not feasible economically and those resources would just be much better used pushing for renewables, which can be quickly brought up and constructed within like 2 to 5 years for large-scale utility outputs, as opposed to 10 years for nukes, so it just doesn’t make sense.

MH: Okay. Arnie?

AG: (21:54) You’re going to see in this two-minute video 18 months of work by ten people filtered down to two minutes. And the process that we got there of taking out all the extraneous stuff – how can I explain this thing in two minutes – was exciting and frustrating and I think at the end of the day, was really, really worthwhile, too. I hope your viewers enjoy it.

MH: Okay, thank you very much, Arnie. And thank you very much, Grayson. So until next time – and viewers, you’re in for this wonderful document – brief video documentary. Thank you so much for watching. And let’s blow the smoke screen away. Thank you Channel 17. Goodbye for now.

GW: In 2015, human activity released 35,810 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. In order to avoid catastrophic climate change, this number must quickly be reduced. Currently, our CO2 production grows by 2 percent every year as people worldwide seek a more affluent lifestyle. The World Nuclear Association, or WNA, has a plan to solve this problem – building 1,000 new nuclear reactors before the year 2050. That means we would need to build a nuclear reactor every 12 days for the next 33 years. Our existing reactors offset only 3 percent of global emissions. Every time a new reactor goes on line, our carbon footprint goes down slightly, and only by this much. Along the way, outdated reactors must be decommissioned, the deadly waste must be tended in perpetuity and each new reactor built will increase the probability of atomic disaster somewhere in the world. Constructing this infrastructure will cost $8.2 trillion. Even after spending all this money and waiting all this time, by the year 2050, these new nuclear reactors will have offset only 3.9 gigatons of CO2, which is less than ten ??23:56 CO2 to green ??24:00 agenda. For the nuclear industry, $8.2 trillion is good business; for humanity, it is an opportunity cost. Precious time and money wasted on the wrong thing. If we follow the WNA, another generation will pass and climate change will only get worse. We already have clean, cheap and ?24:18 is not one of them. The nuclear solution to climate change is a smoke screen. We don’t deny science. Help us protect the water you drink, the food you eat and the air you breathe. Radiation knows no borders.