Decouple26 Jan 2021

Means, Motive, Opportunity: Fossil Fueled Radiophobia feat. Rod Adams

There is money to be made in Nuclear Fear. Consider this. In Japan over the last 10 years since the Fukushima accident, approximately 50 billion USD a year in additional fossil fuels have been traded to supply energy demands that would have been provided by Japan's shuttered nuclear plants. The ability to terrify people with the prospect of serious health harms from low dose radiation has kept most of the Japanese nuclear fleet idle and created an enormous market for LNG and Coal as well as a significant burden of disease secondary to particulate air pollution.

On June 12th 1956 the National Academy of Sciences released its report on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR.) It became part of the basis for a paradigm shift in radiation protection towards the Linear No Threshold model which proposes that radiation is a uniquely dangerous toxin with no safe lower dose limit.

The BIER report was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation whose endowment came directly from the Standard Oil Company. Did the Rockefeller Foundation and its fossil fuel baron patrons have a vested interest in exagerating the dangers of radiation to disparage a potentially disruptive, air pollution free technology that threatened the market share of the fossil fuel industry? Was their support coincidence, conspiracy or just good business acumen?

I am joined by Rod Adams, a former US nuclear submarine engineer officer, who runs the Atomic Insights blog and hosts the Atomic Show podcast to discuss this tantalizing question.

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Episoder(321)

Why the First Nuclear Renaissance Failed: Can America Build Eight AP1000s Now?

The first U.S. nuclear renaissance collapsed under the weight of cheap shale gas, lost institutional expertise, and disastrous projects like Vogtle and Summer. Today, America is planning a fleet of ei...

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The Real Stakes of a Saudi Nuclear Deal

Saudi Arabia burns nearly one million barrels of oil per day to keep its lights on, yet it has cheaper and faster ways to replace this than by building large nuclear reactors. So why is the Kingdom pu...

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Microreactors: A Mirage of American Nuclear Innovation?

In this episode, Chris Keefer speaks with Hadron Energy founder Samuel Gibson, the twenty four year old entrepreneur pursuing a ten megawatt integral pressurized water microreactor through a one point...

25 Nov 202550min

The AP1000 Masterclass

Fan favourite, James Krellenstein, returns for a deep dive into the AP1000. We walk through how its conservative nuclear steam supply system is built from proven Westinghouse and Combustion Engineerin...

18 Nov 20251h 8min

The Great Nuclear Reshoring

In late October, amid the choreography of President Trump’s visit to Tokyo, two vast and curiously intertwined announcements were made: an $80 billion strategic partnership between the U.S. government...

11 Nov 20251h 26min

Russia’s Maritime Nuclear Fleet: A Glimpse Behind the Curtain

This week on Decouple, I sit down with Aleksey Rezvoi, a veteran maritime nuclear engineer who began his career in the Soviet Union designing third- and fourth-generation submarine and icebreaker reac...

4 Nov 20251h 5min

How China Builds Reactors So Fast

This week I sit back down with François Morin in his third appearance on the show. François is the World Nuclear Association’s point person on China. He works and travels inside China, speaks fluent M...

28 Okt 20251h 13min

Engineering State v. Lawyerly Society

This week on Decouple, I sit down with Dan Wang, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover History Lab and author of "Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future." We trace how China became an “engin...

21 Okt 202553min