Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?

Speaker 1 Today, on something you should know, the interesting origins of food names you've wondered about but never knew. Then, we have a problem.
Humans are social creatures, but we're not being very social.

Speaker 2 Basically, since the 1990s, we have seen a steady decline of people spending time being social. We're actually looking at a roughly like 40% reduction.

Speaker 2 People aren't going to places like parties or inviting friends over for dinner or hosting events where they host family or visit other family or friends.

Speaker 1 Also, why people only recently started saying um, ah, and you know, and the renewed interest and push for nuclear power.

Speaker 3 There is quite a growing group of pro-nuclear activists. Most of them are environmentalists, very much concerned about climate change.

Speaker 3 They recognize that beaving up renewables like wind and solar will always fall short.

Speaker 1 All this today on something you should know.

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Speaker 1 Something you should know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today.

Speaker 1 Something you should know with Mike Carruthers.

Speaker 1 Every food has a name, but where some of those names come from will surprise you. Hi, and welcome to something you should know.

Speaker 1 Food names are fascinating. For example, Philadelphia Cream Cheese.
You would assume it must have started in Philadelphia, but it did not. Philadelphia cream cheese started in New York.

Speaker 1 It was called Philadelphia because that city was associated with high quality food products. Gatorade.
Gatorade does not contain any alligator.

Speaker 1 It was a kidney specialist from the University of Florida who helped develop Gatorade,

Speaker 1 and the school's football team is the Florida Gators.

Speaker 1 So it was called Gatorade.

Speaker 1 What about spam? Not the email kind of spam, but the canned meat kind of spam. It got its name from a contest.

Speaker 1 And there is no official explanation for its meaning, but most spam enthusiasts assume spam is short for spiced ham. Why is it called a frisbee?

Speaker 1 Well it comes from the Frisbee Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. They get the credit for this.
The empty tins that the pies came in were perfect for launching across a field.

Speaker 1 The first plastic version was called the Pluto Platter Flying Saucer. Whammo bought the rights to that and stamped Frisbee on it instead.
And marshmallows, marshmallows started out as medicine.

Speaker 1 In In the 1800s, juice from the roots of the marshmallow plant were extracted and cooked with egg whites and sugar. It was whipped up and given to children to soothe sore throats.

Speaker 1 And that's why we have marshmallows. And that is something you should know.

Speaker 1 I'm sure you've heard the statement, the phrase, that human beings are social creatures. We need social interaction.
It's critical for our well-being and survival. People need people.

Speaker 1 The problem is we're becoming less social, and many of us don't even realize this. This is a real problem, according to my guest, Jeffrey Hall.

Speaker 1 He is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at the University of Kansas. He's co-author of the book, The Social Biome.

Speaker 1 How everyday communication connects and shapes us. Hi, Jeffrey.
Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 2 Hey, it's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1 So explain what you mean when you say that we have become less social. You know, when did this start? Why did it start? And what are the consequences of it?

Speaker 2 So basically, since the 1990s, we have seen a steady decline in the United States and across a lot of Western countries of people spending time being social.

Speaker 2 We're actually looking at a roughly like 40% reduction of time spent being social, just conversing for the sake of conversation, for the sake of being social around one another.

Speaker 2 One of of the areas that it's declined the most is actually one that's kind of hard to see because people aren't about doing it.

Speaker 2 People aren't going to places like parties or inviting friends over for dinner or, you know, hosting events where they host family or visit other family or friends.

Speaker 2 So what's interesting is we're not... The people that you see out and about who are actually on their phones are one example of people not necessarily spending time talking to each other.

Speaker 2 But there's a bigger issue here, which is that people are not prioritizing time with one another across Western Europe and in the United States and have not been doing so for 25 years.

Speaker 2 But that took a major hit during the pandemic. A lot of folks actually went down dramatically in their face-to-face conduct and a good number of people haven't recovered since.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 1 That was the tipping point right there was COVID?

Speaker 2 It's sort of think about the idea that it accelerated an existing trend, right? We were already on our way to a less social world and it pushed things further.

Speaker 2 And one of the reasons that it really pushed things further was for younger adults.

Speaker 2 And during that time of development, you know, people want to spend a lot of time in the company of their friends, they fall in love, you know, they spend a ton of time outside of their family of origin, building their new families.

Speaker 2 And during COVID, a lot of that time was restricted.

Speaker 2 So, for a lot of folks, they don't have the kind of friends and connections they would like to have simply because they didn't make them to begin with.

Speaker 2 So, COVID created the conditions that accelerated an existing trend and made things slightly worse.

Speaker 1 But if that's your way of being

Speaker 1 and you know no different,

Speaker 1 you don't even know there's a problem. So, how do you even begin to want to fix it if you don't know that this isn't like this isn't normal?

Speaker 2 That's a really great question.

Speaker 2 You know, one, one of the hardest things is actually to direct the messages that the Surgeon General has and other people have about trying to focus on sociality to raise awareness about the problems associated with loneliness to people who need it the most.

Speaker 2 So, you know, one of the things that my co-author Andy and I talk about a lot is that as professors of communication, you know, as people who actually have very rich social lives and we're both parents and we're both married,

Speaker 2 we actually, even in our situation, we still, through all the research that we get, have to be reminded to be social.

Speaker 2 There's a whole subset of groups of people out there who aren't even aware that not being social is a problem.

Speaker 2 They're not really aware that these are things that they need to be doing for their well-being.

Speaker 2 So, one of the sort of goals that we have broadly is to try to make it clear to folks that taking small steps, achievable little moments of interaction with strangers, with customer service representatives, with the people that you see can make a difference in your daily sociality and actually over time sort of build up your social battery to be more social.

Speaker 1 So, how do you do that? How do you,

Speaker 1 you know, I see this, especially with younger people, when you're in a store or you're watching them interact with a stranger, like

Speaker 1 somebody that works at the store,

Speaker 1 that they're very,

Speaker 1 they're not very pleasant.

Speaker 1 They're not unpleasant. They just, it's very, you know,

Speaker 1 bottle of water, please. You know,

Speaker 1 there's no play. There's no social interaction.

Speaker 1 It's just the transaction. And I see that a lot, that people just don't engage.

Speaker 2 And one of the sort of symptoms of our age of interiority that we live in right now is the feeling of kind of frictionless technology.

Speaker 2 So frictionless technologies are those things which basically make it so that we don't have to have any contact with another person in order to get our food.

Speaker 2 So that's like DoorDash, to order products, to make exchanges, to buy things. That's all the Amazon products to be delivered to your door and otherwise.

Speaker 2 And the idea is that we've built up a technological environment where so much of the social behaviors which were part of just being part of everyday life, you know, shopping, being a neighbor, existing in a community.

Speaker 2 are things that we are we have used technology to replace.

Speaker 2 So there's a good argument to be made that we have collectively as a society agreed that we would prefer to exchange all of those small moments of connection and interaction with things that are simple or perhaps frictionless in the terminology of the tech industry.

Speaker 2 But the consequence of that are, as you say, people become less familiar with how to do it. They also become less comfortable with doing it when they're expected to.

Speaker 2 So those moments of sort of like bottle of water, please, as you meant before, also are for people who are uncomfortable or unfamiliar with the very process of day-to-day interactions and transactions.

Speaker 2 Every opportunity to have an interaction with another person, just acknowledging the dignity of that person and that role that they're playing plays an enormous difference in our sense of well-being and connection to the community.

Speaker 2 So that means looking me in the face and say thank you. That means actually acknowledging the presence

Speaker 2 of a shared moment, whether it's the weather or if you lived in Los Angeles like I did, bad traffic. Whatever it is that you share together is a thing that you can exchange with a person near you.

Speaker 2 And these small moments of connection build up the possibility of a greater sense sense of well-being in general.

Speaker 1 But how do you convince people of that? Like, again, if they don't notice, if they don't see it, if they think what they're doing is fine,

Speaker 1 but like,

Speaker 1 what are the benefits that you can point to and say, well, you know, if

Speaker 1 maybe if we did it this way,

Speaker 1 you, it would be better. Well, how would it be better? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, I'll give you five that are all research-backed, empirically supported. Number one, right? The number one predictor of longevity is social connectedness, right?

Speaker 2 This is actually the equivalent, having being lonely is the equivalent of smoking 20 pack of cigarettes a day or 20 cigarettes a day, right?

Speaker 2 We also, number two, what's interesting is it doesn't just mitigate harm. So being social and having strong relationships doesn't only make you live longer, it makes you happier while you're alive.

Speaker 2 The Harvard Men study found that if you make a change in your sociality in the middle of your life, so maybe you weren't a very social person when you were younger, but you make a commitment to being more strongly connected to your community, your friends, and your family at your middle age, you will be happier later.

Speaker 2 So you can change at any time. So that's the second one.
The third is your days are better. If you look at these what's called time use studies, which basically is how do people allocate their time?

Speaker 2 Where does it go? On any given day, a more social day is generally a better day. It's a day that people feel more connected to one another.
They feel happier.

Speaker 2 They feel a greater sense of purpose and meaning.

Speaker 2 Number four, meaningfulness is actually very difficult to derive from a lot of the sort of pursuits that also might make people feel satisfied in the moment, but not happy in the long term.

Speaker 2 Media is a great example of that. Lots of media is very pleasing in the short term, but not very satisfying in the long term.

Speaker 2 Relationships, on the other hand, are fundamentally built in a way where the constant sort of work that we have to put into maintaining our friendships and being close to other people are rewarding every time we do it.

Speaker 2 That it's not something that has diminishing rewards the more that we have a strong friendship that lasts for years, but we gain in value because we keep working at it.

Speaker 2 And the last thing I would just say is that it's not as hard as I think that a lot of people might fear. Not trying to be perfect in our communication.
There is no perfect way to communicate.

Speaker 2 That a lot of the ways to actually be better at communication is to merely be a responsive partner to the person right next to you.

Speaker 1 Meaning pay attention and listen and participate.

Speaker 2 You got it.

Speaker 1 Is the goal then to convince people to do this

Speaker 1 or to convince people to help people to do this? Because again, if they don't see it as a problem,

Speaker 1 then how are they going to they're going to say, well, this doesn't apply to me. I don't know what he's talking about.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a great question.

Speaker 2 One of the ways that we really want to approach this is that those who probably are the most socially adept and comfortable being social also are the ones that have the most to offer.

Speaker 2 So they're the people who are probably the most able to hear this message and enact it in their daily lives.

Speaker 2 But I would really sort of point out here is that it's very, very difficult for people who are very lonely, partly because loneliness co-occurs with depression, to easily sort of take action to sort of improve their circumstances.

Speaker 2 And you're not wrong, right? The difficulty of actually reaching out to the folks who are feeling disconnected in their lives in a chronic sense is very challenging.

Speaker 2 But I think that one of the messages is that not only can you make

Speaker 2 sort of do certain things, take small steps that we offer very clearly that you can take in order to improve your days.

Speaker 2 But the second thing I think is really critical is doing so for other people is an important act for the people that you care for.

Speaker 2 So when I spend time, let's say, you know, planning to spend time with my friends, when I make a plan, I'm in fact going out with my high school friends tonight to hang out.

Speaker 2 And we do so every other month or every third month. You know, it took arrangement.
People didn't have times that line on.

Speaker 2 We have a text thread where you're always like, well, who's in town and what can we do? But the fact that we work at that means that I get a benefit from it.

Speaker 2 But if I don't put the work into sort of developing those friendships, I can't have those friends. I can't enjoy those friendships.

Speaker 2 And in return, all of my friends also benefit by being responsive to that text thread, to taking the small, making the small sacrifices to show up or to put apart other, you know, put aside other plans to be there.

Speaker 2 So the idea is, is that we give to other people by being social and prioritizing being social in our lives.

Speaker 1 We're discussing the human need to be social and how many of us are not meeting that need.

Speaker 1 My guest is Jeffrey Hall, author of the book The Social Biome, How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us.

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Speaker 1 So, Jeffrey, I think people have heard the statistics that loneliness is on the rise, people have fewer friends, but it doesn't seem to be something that people, I mean, I don't hear a lot of talk about addressing the problem.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, I think we collectively, as a society, certainly need to be continually reminded about the importance of this.
I think that there have been other kind of harbingers of this.

Speaker 2 When Robert Putman wrote his outstanding book, Bowling Alone, he's been warning us about this for years.

Speaker 2 People are aware that these problems are happening, but at this particular day and age, the trends that were put in place in the 90s have all gotten generally worse.

Speaker 2 So this is a time that I feel like there's a certain amount of energy and excitement around this. I think the surgeon in the United States played a role in that.

Speaker 2 I think different countries throughout the world have acknowledged the importance of seeing loneliness as a public health concern. But I think more broadly, people are receptive to the message.

Speaker 2 I think we've seen a change recently where people are starting to say, wait a second, you know what? I want to improve the quality of my social life. How do I go about doing that?

Speaker 2 And so maybe just like in the, you know, in the 70s and 80s, where people started taking physical fitness more seriously as a thing that they need to do to be healthy, maybe we're seeing a time now where people can say, you know what, I want to be socially fit.

Speaker 1 Do you think it's just a big part of this in a very fundamental way is

Speaker 1 electronics, social media,

Speaker 1 phones, whatever you want to call it, has just replaced it. That instead of going to hang out with your friends, you can sit on the couch and hang out with your virtual friends.

Speaker 1 And so you've just swapped one for the other?

Speaker 2 It's a great question. One of the ways to think about this is think about the fact that all technologies are energy efficient.

Speaker 2 So whether it's a dishwasher or whether it's even the printing press, it is an efficient, much more efficient way of basically getting things done in the past. People love efficiencies.

Speaker 2 And one of the theories and ideas we operate from is the value of people place on having to do less. So a text is less work than a phone call.

Speaker 2 A phone call is less work than a face-to-face interaction. So people actually generally, when given the option, will kind of trend towards the things that require less of them.

Speaker 2 So I think that you're not wrong to suggest that the proliferation of technologies for communication between individuals have made it easier to send a forego, more challenging communication that was more face-to-face, or that's a longer conversation, like on a phone call.

Speaker 2 I think what's really tricky is that these technologies are also ones which are always being updated and more and more appealing. So it's hard to resist them.

Speaker 2 So the technology sort of reflects back to us our values that we're placing and become easier and more efficient as they are developed to make it simpler and simpler to do less work with our social relationships.

Speaker 1 When you're out talking to people and presenting this idea, What's the reaction? What do you hear? I mean, do people go, I don't know what you're talking about?

Speaker 1 Or Or do they say, well, yeah, this is great. I've been waiting for this.

Speaker 1 What do you hear?

Speaker 2 Well, I think one of the very sort of positive notes that I've heard when people have responded to this idea is that they're excited about being given some direction.

Speaker 2 You know, being given some direction on sort of what to do or how to approach it is valuable.

Speaker 2 I think a lot of people also find it fascinating to think about this idea that they have a social battery, you know, of social energy that they want to build up or develop, like a muscle that you do when you exercise.

Speaker 2 I think that people are also receptive to the idea that it doesn't take that much, it's not that hard.

Speaker 2 You know, it's not that complicated, that we have particular little strategies like talking to strangers or showing dignity to another person or listening rather than trying to be a perfect communicator that are all like not impossible, but they show research-backed evidence to get people moving in the right direction.

Speaker 2 But the compliment we get most often is that it's really sympathetic to this is hard.

Speaker 2 Like it's not easy to really change our habits or to do differently when it comes to something as common and everyday as you know communication.

Speaker 2 I'm asking people to take small steps and have self-forgiveness towards the fact that this is difficult, but it's work that's absolutely worth doing.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the first step is just to commit to doing it, I guess.

Speaker 1 You've got to realize that this is something worthwhile,

Speaker 1 a goal to pursue.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 2 I think people have to acknowledge that this is something that they want to sort of improve in their lives and that they want to try to find a seek that balance that creates a very healthy social biome for them to live in.

Speaker 1 Have you looked at like whether or not people, like

Speaker 1 I remember people in my life that were great at this and they're kind of an inspiration to like, wow, look, look how he

Speaker 1 navigates all these people and interacts and makes people happy when he talks to them.

Speaker 1 Like, wow, I'd like to do that. Is there any sense of that, you know, finding a role model for this is really helpful?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I think we can always look in our communities for like, who's really good at this? And maybe they can give me some tips.

Speaker 2 You know, I certainly have people who I've met before that are amazing storytellers or such excellent listeners or are just so funny that I want to spend more time around her, around them.

Speaker 2 And we're always going to find people that are superlative at communication or really good at it. And I think getting some ideas about how to be good at it from them is a great idea.

Speaker 2 But Andy and I actually try to offer something that's much simpler is that a lot of times people just kind of like to be heard and they enjoy the fact that another person is responsive to them.

Speaker 2 So what's fascinating is when there are different sort of interventions that are done in communication research or in psychology research to have people engage in specific social behaviors, a lot of times the value of just being present or just listening or just acknowledging another person is as good as any perfect line or any perfect statement or any great joke.

Speaker 2 It's simply valuable simply to be there for another person to be responsive and interested in what they have to say.

Speaker 2 You know, I think that, you know, the kind of great Dale Carnegie's argument that if you want to be interesting, talk to the person's interests is a great piece of advice.

Speaker 2 In many ways, merely being responsive to what's exciting to another person makes them interested in you.

Speaker 1 You mentioned a moment ago a book called Bowling Alone. When was that out?

Speaker 2 It was released, I believe, in 99.

Speaker 1 I don't remember that, but I love that title because,

Speaker 1 well, and what does he say in that?

Speaker 2 Putnam Putnam does this analysis that goes back into roughly the 1950s to the present at that time, so the late 90s, and talks about sort of the decline of membership in bowling leagues, in social clubs, in Elk's Lodge, all these different sort of organizations that were pro-social, community-oriented, and also, and oftentimes just meant for leisure and spending time together for fun.

Speaker 2 And he looks at the decline of membership, the decline of participation in these things for roughly a 50-year period.

Speaker 1 So his arguments around bowling alone or in the book bowling alone were really fundamental and sort of setting the tone for a lot of researchers thinking about the importance of social behavior and having a just and and healthy society well what did he what did he conclude because a lot of that decline happened before social media and the internet so and and not only those organizations but you know just involvement in church and those kind of things all seem to go down the same decline

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, at the time, you know, his conclusions were really focused on a couple factors. You know, one of those factors was actually the change of women in the workplace.

Speaker 2 So, tons of women joined the workplace during that same period of time, which made it harder for there to be a person in the home that was coordinating the social schedule or planning events or making time for these things to facilitate the organization of the family to make these things possible.

Speaker 2 Some of it actually at the time, he was concerned about the internet, you know, internet society or the rise of the internet as being a contributing factor and the ease in which that media was able to be accessed.

Speaker 2 But the point that Putnam made, I actually would love to be able to share is he was interviewed about his work in the New York Times only

Speaker 2 last year. And last year, he said that for years he's kind of been a Cassandra warning us about the processes of these things and he only sees them continuing.

Speaker 2 And the recommendation that he has now is the same that one he had in the 90s, which was we have to convince people that it's in their own interest to be more socially obligated to one another for us to live in a world in which that we are obliged to one another to care for one another, and that's a better world to live in.

Speaker 1 Well, earlier, I stated an assumption that if people don't know it's a problem, it's hard to fix. But do people know this is a problem?

Speaker 1 Do people lament that, gee, I wish I had more friends, I wish I was more social, or do people gener, I mean, I'm sure there's people in every camp, but generally speaking, the people who are struggling with this, do they know they're struggling with this?

Speaker 2 I think so.

Speaker 2 One thing that I think is a very interesting statistic, people are generally speaking, have friends.

Speaker 2 There's a high, high, high percentage of people who have friends. It's like 98, 97% of people say, I have friends.
The second is people's rates of satisfaction with their friends are very high.

Speaker 2 So people are like, yeah, I really like my friends. I have good friends.

Speaker 2 And they're even higher if you ask questions like, do you have people who will celebrate your good times and cheer you on if something good's happening?

Speaker 2 And they say, even a higher percentage of people say, yes, I have those people.

Speaker 2 But the two things that people also say is, I'm not as close to my friends that I would like to be, and I'm not making time for them.

Speaker 2 So one thing to think about, I think, is the broader sort of message is for sure, there are folks out there who are struggling with chronic loneliness, and I think we need to be attentive to that.

Speaker 2 But I think for the kind of the modern kind of American circumstance is that people have relationships, they just don't have the time and aren't making it a priority to deepen those relationships or prioritize them in a way that we organize our days and weeks.

Speaker 1 You know, know, I bet everybody listening has a sense that this is going on, that they've noticed this lack of social connection.

Speaker 1 And it's good to hear from someone who actually studies it and can quantify it to get a sense of just how big the problem is and what we can do to fix it. Jeffrey A.
Hall has been my guest.

Speaker 1 He is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at the University of Kansas.

Speaker 1 And he has a book out called The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes.
Jeffrey, thanks.

Speaker 2 I appreciate it. Thank you, Mike.

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Speaker 1 One thing you don't hear talked about a lot is nuclear power.

Speaker 1 And I confess I don't know a whole lot about it, but my sense has always been that nuclear technology can produce more, better, and cleaner power than any other source, except for the safety concern.

Speaker 1 What if something goes wrong? You mention nuclear power and people think of Three Mile Island or Chernobyl or the fact that nuclear power and nuclear bombs have the same origin.

Speaker 1 And for all of those reasons and probably a whole lot more, there aren't a lot of nuclear power plants.

Speaker 1 But as you're about to hear, the people concerned about the safety of nuclear power plants aren't so concerned about it anymore. We have pretty much licked that problem.

Speaker 1 And in fact, there are 93 nuclear reactors in the United States. And in France, 70% of their power comes from nuclear reactors.
So why aren't we building more of them?

Speaker 1 What is the future of nuclear power? Here with some insight into this topic is Marco Vischer.

Speaker 1 He's an award-winning journalist who has written extensively about climate policy and clean technology, and he is the author of several books, including The Power of Nuclear. Hi, Marco.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 3 Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 So why isn't anyone talking about nuclear power? It doesn't come up much. I don't hear it talked about much.

Speaker 1 In all the conversations about energy and alternative forms of energy like wind and solar, no one ever mentions nuclear.

Speaker 3 This is the fun thing about nuclear power, I think. It is a very nerdy thing, but it's not at all what is exciting to me.

Speaker 3 What is a much more inspiring answer is saying that nuclear power is zero carbon electricity that's produced 24-7.

Speaker 3 People will say that nuclear power is our best bet if we want to avoid further climate change because no greenhouse gases are emitted. so they can replace coal and natural gas plants.

Speaker 3 Now, others will say, no, nuclear power is the worst technology ever. It's the most dangerous thing we have.
It's leading to environmental collapse, they say, or an all-out war.

Speaker 3 It's destroying civilization. And I guess for me, I prefer a more historic approach.
I think throughout human history, we always faced scarcity.

Speaker 3 So we were always deprived of enough energy to break away from the toil, from hard labor. And we cut down forests, you know, to keep warm.

Speaker 3 We depleted coal mines once we found out that burning coal is more efficient than burning wood.

Speaker 3 And then suddenly came along nuclear power,

Speaker 3 this bizarre hocus-pocus kind of power, right? And it's abundant and it's clean. And I think it's just magical.

Speaker 3 Just one gram of uranium produces as much energy as three tons of coal. So the invention, the discovery of nuclear power is nothing short of a revolution.

Speaker 3 And sadly, for all sorts of reasons, we're 80 years later now and we still haven't used its full potential.

Speaker 1 Well, I find it really surprising that you as a journalist who writes a lot about clean energy, that you are so pro-nuclear, because I don't know why. I would just think you would not be.

Speaker 1 But let's go back. When did nuclear power become a thing?

Speaker 3 In the Second World War. So the world was introduced to nuclear power with the atomic bomb.
Dropped on Hiroshima. A couple of days later, one dropped.
on Nagasaki, ending the world war, basically.

Speaker 3 That's probably not the best way to tell people that we have found a fantastic energy source, right?

Speaker 3 It's probably the worst PR stunt ever, if you think of it.

Speaker 3 But this is the reality. This is how we came to learn about nuclear power.
Nuclear bombs and nuclear plants have the same basic physics. They both split.
atoms and they use that energy.

Speaker 3 What's relevant here is if if you think of a nuclear weapon as an outsized stick of dynamite with the energy bursting out all at once, a nuclear plant is a mere stick of incense with the energy being calmly released.

Speaker 1 So the first nuclear power plant went online when?

Speaker 3 This was the early 1950s. So after the Second World War,

Speaker 3 when we knew

Speaker 3 how to get the energy from splitting the atom, soon all these ideas came up to establish a fleet of electricity plants, if you will, power plants, and produce nuclear power for peaceful purposes, providing electricity for households and businesses.

Speaker 3 This was done in the US, but also in Russia, later on in France as well, and Canada, and all sorts of countries. They may have had different reasons for building this fleet of nuclear power plants.

Speaker 3 For some, it had everything to do with the nuclear bomb and this very secret nuclear technology. If you had a nuclear bomb, you were on top of the world, right? This was such a powerful weapon.

Speaker 3 Nothing had ever... had been seen before in warfare.

Speaker 3 And for others, it was for other countries, nuclear power was perfect because they had depleted coal mines. France, for instance, doesn't have that much resources at all.

Speaker 3 So for France, it made a lot of sense to have nuclear power plants providing energy.

Speaker 1 And so when did it fall out of favor? It seemed to have, and people that don't like nuclear energy point to Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and talk about nuclear waste and all that.

Speaker 1 At some point, because it seems like it came online and this was a great thing, and then something happened.

Speaker 3 So you mentioned Three Mile Island. We're talking about an accident at a nuclear plant near Harrisburg, where a partial meltdown took place in 1979.

Speaker 3 This is in the history books, probably in the U.S., as the worst nuclear accident in the U.S. And this was, I mean, this was a serious accident, right?

Speaker 3 It was due to a stuck valve and a bad judgment call in the control room. Now, nobody was injured.
Nobody fell ill. Nobody died.

Speaker 3 That's because the radiation released to nearby residents amounted to, say,

Speaker 3 the equivalent of having a few x-rays at your dentist.

Speaker 3 Now, Chernobyl. was a completely different story.
It was a unique story, if you will, a reactor with a unique design that's not in use anymore.

Speaker 3 and it the accident happened under unique circumstances this was not a meltdown but a blow-up if you will a reactor exploded with the reactor open and and exposed now to estimate the effects on public health we should go by the reports from the chernobyl forum which is a collection of several UN organizations, including the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.

Speaker 3 The World Health Organization is also part of it. So these reports show that immediate after the event,

Speaker 3 a few dozen deaths because of the explosion and acute radiation sickness among workers and firefighters.

Speaker 3 And that's where the death toll still stands today, a few dozen. Now, by 2065, 80 years after the accident, there is a chance of an increase in deaths due to cancer.

Speaker 3 So in a population of several million people, we can expect a few thousand additional deaths, but we will never be able to tell whether these cancer cells actually came about because of exposure to the radiation released after the Chernobyl disaster.

Speaker 3 Radiation is something that messes with our minds. And I think even before these accidents, it was already in people's mind that there was something eerie about radiation.

Speaker 3 Even before nuclear power existed, we were afraid of radiation. So when radioactivity was discovered around 1900 by Marie Curie in France,

Speaker 3 you had all these comic books, for instance, especially in the 1920s, talking about these superheroes who

Speaker 3 had brilliant powers because of radiation, or there were super villains

Speaker 3 who could destroy the planet using radiation, right?

Speaker 3 When x-rays became more popular in hospitals, doctors, mainly doctors, developed diseases, terrible diseases, because they would test their x-ray machines by holding their hand in front of

Speaker 3 the machine. There were horrible stories there.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 because radiation, probably because radiation is invisible and you cannot smell it, it has become a monster, basically, an invisible monster.

Speaker 3 And we think that any exposure to radiation would make us very, very sick.

Speaker 1 So I'm sensing from what you're saying that despite people's fears about nuclear power, that in fact it is clean and it is safe.

Speaker 1 And if that is true, then why hasn't that truth that nuclear power is clean and safe, why hasn't that truth pushed nuclear power forward and pushed the critics aside?

Speaker 3 It seems to me that the suspicion of nuclear power is so deep in our unconscious, I guess even.

Speaker 3 We are always looking for

Speaker 3 justifications to not use nuclear power. So if I explain, this happened to me so many times, if I talk to people

Speaker 3 who don't don't like nuclear power, I can comfort them and say, well, it's really not as dangerous as you think.

Speaker 3 If you compare this with other ways of energy production, like, you know, coal mines collapse and the gas pipelines burst and a dam could break.

Speaker 3 I can comfort people and say,

Speaker 3 it's really, it's really the safest energy source we have along with sun, solar and wind. Then they move on and say, oh, but what about the waste? And I I said, no, no, no, the waste is not a problem.

Speaker 3 We know exactly what we do. Waste has never made anyone sick or

Speaker 3 nobody ever died from nuclear waste from a nuclear reactor. It's perfectly fine.
And then they say, oh, but there will not be enough uranium, right? No, no, there is enough uranium on every continent.

Speaker 3 It's even in the ocean. It's everywhere.
And it seems people come up with arguments to not use nuclear power.

Speaker 3 Some people, it seems, don't want to be comforted and I think that their suspicion of nuclear power is just having a prejudice looking for a justification.

Speaker 1 Well, I remember hearing another argument, like, well, what if one of our enemies blew up a nuclear power plant and all this radiation escaped and that that wouldn't be good?

Speaker 3 A nuclear reactor is actually built to

Speaker 3 withstand a bomb.

Speaker 3 Probably not the heaviest bomb, but the reasons to use your heaviest bombs on a nuclear reactor are that would be crazy. It's very unlikely that anything like that would ever happen.

Speaker 3 This is another thing, Mike. This is another...

Speaker 3 It's such an unlikely scenario, if you come to think of it. Once you start thinking in those kind of unlikely scenarios, you will never be comforted, right?

Speaker 1 But if you're right, and I don't have any reason to think you're not, but if you're right, if nuclear power is really so great, why aren't more people screaming from the mountaintops that we need more nuclear power plants?

Speaker 3 Actually, there is quite a large group, a growing group of pro-nuclear activists. Most of them are environmentalists, very much concerned about climate change.

Speaker 3 They recognize that tackling climate change with beefing up renewables like wind and solar will always fall short just because wind and solar do not produce energy around the clock, whereas a nuclear plant is a true competitor to fossil fuels because a nuclear power plant produces electricity whenever you want it.

Speaker 3 And these pro-nuclear groups are actually gaining ground. We also see world leaders who make promises to expand the nuclear fleet.

Speaker 3 There are business leaders from data centers and

Speaker 3 Twitter and Amazon who would like to see small modular reactors providing zero carbon electricity for their data centers, et cetera. So there is actually

Speaker 3 a change over time favoring nuclear much more than has been the case in the past 20 years.

Speaker 1 How much nuclear power is there now? How many, if you know, how many plants are there in the U.S. and

Speaker 1 or around the world? And how much of our electricity comes from nuclear right now?

Speaker 3 So around the world, there are around 450 nuclear reactors spread amongst 30 countries or so. But the U.S.
has the most nuclear reactors.

Speaker 3 France is the country with the highest percentage of nuclear power in the electricity grid, up to 70 or 75%, something like that. Worldwide, these nuclear power plants provide around 10%

Speaker 3 of all electricity around the world. This is down from 17%

Speaker 3 at the height around the mid-90s or so. So there is, in share, very much a decline despite all the industry talk about a nuclear renaissance.
that is not what I'm seeing at least.

Speaker 3 Since the year 2000, about 120 reactors or so came online. That sounds impressive, right? But in the same years, that 20-year span, the same number went down, got taken off the grid.

Speaker 3 So we're really not in a position that we can say that nuclear power

Speaker 3 is gaining ground. In Europe, nuclear power is the most important source of electricity.
So one in four light bulbs here

Speaker 3 provide light thanks to a nuclear reactor.

Speaker 1 What's the general mood of people? If you took the temperature of people, I mean, do they care? Are they pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear? Is it moving one way or the other? What is the temperature?

Speaker 3 Overall, people are much more willing to accept nuclear power than many people think, right? If you open a newspaper or look at the

Speaker 3 T V news,

Speaker 3 you would almost think that everybody is against nuclear power. But this is not at all what is shown in opinion polls by established polling agencies.

Speaker 3 I remember in Poland, around 80% or so favors

Speaker 3 nuclear power. This is because Poland has all these dirty coal power plants and many people in Poland Poland want to get rid of these coal power plants.
But also in the Netherlands,

Speaker 3 the number of people who are in favor of nuclear power outnumber people who are against it by far. And this is the case in many countries.

Speaker 3 And what's more interesting even is that this is the case in a very diverse group, even when you think of politics. So Democrats also,

Speaker 3 in a majority, support nuclear power. Even in the Green Party, I know in the Netherlands, more people actually support nuclear power than are against it.

Speaker 3 It's different when you look at the people running the party. But that's, I guess, politics.
And I guess it says something about politics,

Speaker 3 which attracts people who may not have this technical expertise, but are trained in

Speaker 3 communications and

Speaker 3 what have you, and the humanities, but not so much in natural science um but this this is surprising to many people that there is wide public support for nuclear power and it's rising partly in in europe especially because of the russian invasion in ukraine because that's when it was shown so clearly that in europe we have become very much dependent on fossil fuels coming from Russia.

Speaker 3 And if you want to get rid of of that dependence, then nuclear power is a very good bet because uranium is available all around the world and you don't need Russian uranium or so.

Speaker 3 You can get it from many places.

Speaker 1 Is there any other anti-nuclear power argument besides the safety, besides the concerns about the waste, besides the, you know, what we've already talked about and what people have heard?

Speaker 1 Is there any other argument?

Speaker 3 I guess the main thing now is

Speaker 3 people say we don't really need nuclear power because we have solar and wind. Well, of course we have solar and wind, but we need something to fill

Speaker 3 the time slots when the clouds are in the air blocking the sun, right? And when there is no wind. So

Speaker 3 for that,

Speaker 3 you could have batteries, but batteries don't grow on trees or so. You need to produce them, right? Or you need to produce hydrogen if that's your option to as a backup fuel.

Speaker 3 Currently it's always natural gas that's used to backup solar and wind.

Speaker 3 But that means carbon emissions, right?

Speaker 3 A nuclear power plant will replace a natural gas plant or a coal power plant.

Speaker 3 So that's one argument. They say we don't need it.
And the other argument, I guess, is costs.

Speaker 3 Now a nuclear reactor is indeed very, very expensive and it takes a very long time before that reactor is finally ready and open to provide electricity to the grid.

Speaker 1 Well, I freely admit that I know very little about nuclear technology and nuclear power. But and a lot of what you said surprised me.

Speaker 1 But as you were talking, and this is kind of the breaking the rules of being a good interviewer where I'm supposed to focus exactly on what you're saying.

Speaker 1 But I was Googling a few things that you were saying to see if it were true, and everything you said is backed up.

Speaker 1 That there isn't a lot of evidence to support the critics of nuclear power, although there are critics and they do have their arguments. I've been speaking with Marco Vischer.

Speaker 1 He's an award-winning journalist who's written extensively about climate policy and clean technology. And his latest book is called The Power of Nuclear.

Speaker 1 And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Marco, I appreciate you coming on and explaining all this.

Speaker 3 Thanks, Mike.

Speaker 3 It was a pleasure being here with you.

Speaker 1 I'm sure you're familiar with the fact that people say um,

Speaker 1 ah, and you know a lot. These things are called speech disfluencies, and we say them while we're putting our next thought together before we speak.

Speaker 1 It's assumed that people have always done this throughout human history in all languages.

Speaker 1 But one researcher looked back through the literature for several centuries centuries and could find no mention of people using um, ah, and you know.

Speaker 1 The first discussion of these things appears in early 20th century writing and seems to coincide with the beginning of the phonograph and the radio.

Speaker 1 After the 1920s, when radio really started to be popular, discussions of um ah, and you know became widespread.

Speaker 1 And the assumption is that this is because with the invention of the phonograph and the radio, people could actually hear what they sounded like when they spoke and started noticing that people were saying um ah, and you know.

Speaker 1 By the way, the very first recorded ah

Speaker 1 was made by Thomas Edison in 1888. And that is something you should know.
You know, we are always looking to attract new listeners.

Speaker 1 And you as a current listener, well, current listeners are the best source of new listeners because you tell somebody you like this podcast and suggest they listen, they're more likely to give it a try.

Speaker 1 So, please tell people about something you should know, it really does help us. I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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