047 Joshua Goldstein, Co Creator of Nuclear Now

[00:00:00] Joshua Goldstein: And so a place like Massachusetts and really the whole billion rich people should be doing is to create the tools by which those 6 billion people can grow and enjoy energy and grow up out of poverty into prosperity without burning fossil fuels.

It means we need to be creating new technologies that can work in those parts of the world because it’s really expensive to do it the way we’re trying to do it in Massachusetts or Germany.

So this is my nuclear power pitch to the nuclear industry is make it cheap. It’s got to be, we’ve got to figure a way to do this cheaper. And part of that is getting over the radiation fear that leads to this over regulation. That means that every power plant needs to be, you know, spending tons of money to prevent tiny amounts of radiation from being released.

And part of it is just that the industry needs to focus more on cheap solutions that will work around the world.

[00:02:03] Mark Hinaman: Welcome to another episode of the Fire2Fission podcast, where we talk about energy dense fuels and how they can better human lives. My name is Mark Hinaman and I’m joined today by Dr. Joshua Goldstein. Dr. Goldstein is the Professor Emeritus of International Relations, American University and Research Scholar Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts.

Dr. Goldstein, how are you doing today?

[00:02:25] Joshua Goldstein: Good. Thanks for having me on. How are you?

[00:02:27] Mark Hinaman: Yeah, excellent. Well, we, we normally kick this off by having folks give kind of a 30 to 60 second elevator pitch. So help our audience familiarize themselves with who you are. And then we’ve got a lot to talk about.

So

[00:02:41] Joshua Goldstein: sure. I’m an old environmentalist. I’m still an environmentalist and I used to be against nuclear power for the obvious reasons. And then I became a global trends, kind of person in international relations, got interested in climate change because I had children and discovered that we need a lot of nuclear power to solve climate change.

No way about it. Two ways about it. And and so I learned about it and discovered, actually, I do like it. And so I wrote a book about it, how Sweden decarbonized quickly. And then Oliver Stone just turned the book into a film. And here we are. Yeah,

[00:03:19] Mark Hinaman: excellent. Yeah. I’ve got a lot to dive into some about your previous books and your previous works and the, the movie, right?

Nuclear now lots of, lots of, lots to discuss. So let’s, let’s start with this idea of well, first off, you’ve, you’ve done a ton of work. I did some homework on you before we did this interview and your, your library of work is extensive. I was, I was impressed. But you do have on your webpage one it’s kinda like a Wikipedia what’s the word I’m looking for?

Kinda like a Wikipedia delimiter or ambiguity . That’s like, who is the Joshua Goldstein. Oh, right, .

[00:03:59] Joshua Goldstein: Yeah. When I was. Joshua was a very unusual name. People would say, Oh, that’s a pretty name. I’ve never heard that before kind of thing. And then when I was about probably 30 years old, which was a long time ago, it just hit the wave of Joshua’s and Jennifer’s, right?

And so then everybody. From a Goldstein family named their kid Joshua, and now there’s a lot of us running around, but I’m, I’m, I’m the joshuagoldstein. com So I get to put up the disambiguation page on my website.

[00:04:30] Mark Hinaman: I love it. Joshua, why don’t you talk a little bit about two or three projects that you worked on in your career that you’re proud of, or maybe some that you dread remembering?

[00:04:40] Joshua Goldstein: Well One that I’m proud of is my work on war and gender. It’s the title of the book. I wrote it about 20 years ago. And it started in graduate school. I was studying international relations and I thought you know, so much of what goes on in international relations is shaped by gender expectations.

And so much of what happens in war is organized around gender. And I began to realize so much of what happens in gender is organized around war and the need to possibly go to war. You know, you can think you have a peaceful society, but you could be overrun by a neighbor or something. And, and you could need to mobilize an army.

We raise boys in preparation for that possibility. So this kind of extensive interplay between gender in our day to day lives and war and the, the not prevalence, but ubiquity of the possibility of war in our societies. You know, you never know if you’re going to need to go to war. So, I wrote a book about that, well, no, first I took notes in graduate school and made a note to myself about the projects that were sort of unfinished that I was carrying forward into my professor years, and one of them, the note said, war and gender, most interesting of all, will ruin career, wait till after tenure, so it’s more or less, more or less what I did.

I wrote a few other books, and then I got back and wrote a, it’s a big interdisciplinary book with a lot of evidence from. This, you know, topic in different disciplines and psychology and political science and the biological stuff and the history and so forth and sort of compiled it all in a, a readable form in a, a big thick book, and that won the book of the decade award from international studies association. So that’s a, that’s an award I like, you know, so that was one. And then hold on. I’m going to silence my phone should have done it at the outset. And then of course my, my. Oh, I wrote a book 10 years ago called Winning the War on War.

It was also pretty interesting because it was about the trend. I had a textbook in international relations, and every year I would update it. It had a list of the wars in progress, where they were, how big they were. And I noticed after more than a decade that the number of wars was shrinking. This was…

post Cold War era. Fewer wars, smaller wars. So I read a whole book about that. Why people don’t see, as long as there’s one war going on, it’s one too many and all the reporters are focused there and everyone will say the world’s going to hell. Look at this war going on. But, in fact, if you get way back and look at it from a distance, there were fewer wars.

And just at that time Professor Steven Pinker at Harvard, who’s got a bigger following than me by a long shot, was working on the same topic and wrote his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. So we worked together a little bit while I was doing my book and he doing his. His is more sweeping and more historical, mine is more last few decades, what’s going on and what’s the role of the United Nations in it, which is something I think underappreciated by people.

So I was. I was also pleased with that project. And then the latest one The book’s called A Bright Future, how some countries have decarbonized and the others can follow. I worked with a young Swedish nuclear engineer, Stefan Kvist, and just read about how Sweden had very quickly built nuclear power, got rid of fossil fuels, decarbonized their grid decades ago.

As you know, France did the same thing. Ontario’s done a similar thing. So these are our proven models. And it was just great to write about, you know, what we can do about climate change and that this can go very fast and be very affordable. And we know it works because a big country like France did it and successfully.

So that’s our model. And then Of course, turning it into an Oliver Stone movie is another whole

[00:08:45] Mark Hinaman: level of that’s always helpful, right? Impact

[00:08:48] Joshua Goldstein: and also craziness. And I spent a few years on that. My first probably last Hollywood project, I

[00:08:55] Mark Hinaman: don’t know, , you never know. Was it exhausting? I imagine it was kind

[00:09:00] Joshua Goldstein: of, sounds tiring, exhausting, but it would come in in waves where I would write.

So the whole dynamic here was that I knew the material. And Oliver Stone didn’t know anything about it really, the science of it. That’s really helpful.

[00:09:14] Mark Hinaman: That’s like a great way

[00:09:15] Joshua Goldstein: to do a documentary. Yeah, but he knew how to make a movie and I didn’t know anything about it. I’ve never worked on a movie before.

So I would write stuff that was accurate and compelling and logical, but boring. Right? The professor. And then he, the filmmaker, would write stuff that was scintillating and exciting and emotional, but it was all wrong, factually. And so we’d go back and forth on this. And then, so I’d wait for weeks.

Nothing would happen. I’d be waiting for something to happen. And then he’d suddenly call up and say, Oh, I’ve got a new way to do it. I am sending you a new version. And everything would be changed. We’d be all full of mistakes again. And then we worked. forward from there again. It took three years instead of one that it was supposed to.

Of course, there’s a pandemic in there. And eventually we got to a film that I really like. I think it’s really great. And it’s gotten very good feedback from the people who’ve seen it.

[00:10:08] Mark Hinaman: I loved it. I thought it was great. I want to talk about the film, but before we do that, I, I I love that you focused on war for a lot of your career.

I mean, it’s, it’s always relevant throughout history, but I’ve got a long flight coming up, so I’ll have to pick up the war and gender book. I’m

[00:10:25] Joshua Goldstein: excited for that. Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, so my focus is not about how to fight wars or how to win wars, which I really don’t know anything about. I never was in the military, luckily never was in a war from any position.

But it’s about the. The effect of war on society and the effect of society on war, it’s kind of that relationship of what, what role does war play in our collective lives, our collective imaginations, how we organize ourselves as society. So I’ve written about war and economics, war and gender, of course, and a war and diplomacy and that kind of stuff, you know, like how How that relationship is so important, but often we’re just focused on, you know, there isn’t any war, it’s peace, and then war breaks out, and then it’s war, and then how do we fight the war, what do we do?

Now, I’m,

[00:11:17] Mark Hinaman: I’m curious, Dr. Goldstein, you know, I mean, you self admitted, you said when, back when you were Younger or a long time ago. I mean, when, when I see you on camera now, I, I would say you’re not a day over maybe 26 or 28, but maybe that’s just the resolutions.

[00:11:29] Joshua Goldstein: Low. Yeah,

[00:11:30] Mark Hinaman: I don’t know. I’m curious, you know, you, you might be a little older or more familiar with kind of cold war era.

I’m

curious on that nuclear historically had a bad rap, right? From cold war and this whole. dichotomy of Well, all the data shows that it’s great for the environment, but most environmental groups are against it. It feels like a hangover from this war piece, right? From the bomb.

[00:12:02] Joshua Goldstein: Yeah, it’s crazy and it’s so frustrating.

But I was in that generation that hid under our desks preparing for a nuclear attack. Yeah. You know, have this drill where you put your head under your desk and you kind of have the sense, even at a tender age, that it’s not really going to help.

[00:12:21] Mark Hinaman: It’s just kind of five years old. And you’re like, my dad said the same thing.

He was characterized as, well, this is where we kind of just get under the bus under the desk and assume this position and you’re thinking this is you’re going to kiss your ass goodbye,

[00:12:35] Joshua Goldstein: right? Yeah. Five, you might. Believe it. But by 10, you certainly know that’s not going to work. And it was an existential kind of dread that we all had because at any moment, and with little warning, this siren could start wailing.

And you look up on your classroom wall to see what that particular pattern of siren means and it means the missiles are incoming and in less than 30 minutes, you’re going to be gone, everybody you know, everything you love is going to be gone, the whole civilization is going to be gone, right, in 30 minutes.

And that’s just very hard to grow up in that kind of environment. And so, we had Trauma response to it. I think collectively. Yeah. And when you’re traumatized, you don’t think clearly. And then as we talk about in the film, there were, there were elements in society that didn’t like nuclear energy. And one of them was the Rockefeller Foundation starting right at the outside of the cold war.

They told themselves, and I’m sure it had truth to it, that They wanted to make people afraid of radiation because that way they’d stop the atmospheric bomb tests. You know, we had hundreds of these, you know, let’s blow off a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere and let the radioactive byproducts all just drift where they go.

And I don’t think it really was harmful to people at the, you know. but it was good that we stopped doing it. And so, so if people are afraid of radiation, they’ll stop this testing and that’ll stop people developing new bombs and it’ll end the arms race. So all it did was push the testing underground when they had the treaty, partial test ban treaty, and it didn’t stop the arms race.

It didn’t stop the cold war, any of that.

[00:14:22] Mark Hinaman: Engineers, military, they’re creative, right? Oh, we can’t test bombs. So

[00:14:26] Joshua Goldstein: the atmosphere, the fact that the Rockefeller foundation also was the embodiment of, especially at that time, very closely tied to the Rockefeller family and all their wealth that they were giving out for mostly very noble causes was from fossil fuels.

And this was a, you know, a competing energy source that I hope will put fossil fuels out of business. So it’s hard to untangle quite what their motivations was, but it had a huge effect because People like me who were already afraid of the weapons and, and war just became afraid of everything radioactive, everything to do with.

Nuclear anything. And then, as you know, came the, the movies that we were, we watched starting from Godzilla and it came from the deep and this kind of stuff where it’s always starts with some radioactive material, which somehow causes a mutation that makes monsters grow. And then the monsters are wreaking havoc, you know, be it an octopus taking out the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge Or the, or Godzilla knocking down power lines and all that kind of stuff.

So and then Hollywood continued with China syndrome in 1979, which I remember watching and it was, you know, made you scared. That’s what. It’s what it was supposed to do. Hollywood’s good at that. And, and, of course, Three Mile Island being greatly overhyped because it came out right in the middle of that film and the, the atmosphere around it.

And Silkwood in the 1980s and it’s just continued on through. The Simpsons, of course, it’s, it’s just a joke in The Simpsons and yet, you know, those attitudes. Stick still people what they know about nuclear power. They learned from the Simpsons It’s

[00:16:11] Mark Hinaman: completely was kind of this prevalent story from

[00:16:14] Joshua Goldstein: the off culture that nuclear waste is this green goop I don’t even know where that comes from and that the waste is stored in yellow barrels That’s always these yellow barrels strewn around everywhere.

It’s like complete fictions, but that’s what that’s what we had. So So we were all against it. Okay, that’s a long answer to your question. I’m not sure if we got

[00:16:35] Mark Hinaman: to the question yet. Do you, so the accumulation of all these things, the prevalence in pop culture, the bomb test the propaganda campaign from certain philanthropic organizations against radiation I mean the Al Qaeda, the Hollywood effort, right? And

[00:16:56] Joshua Goldstein: then the environmental groups. And, and that’s kind of a long story. I don’t know if you want to go into it, but the environmental groups like the Sierra club was originally pro nuclear power and it’s, it’s just logical because it’s so much better for the environment than anything’s certainly better than hydroelectric where you, you’re flooding whole ecosystems, certainly better than sprawling solar and wind, you know, on.

Delicate ecosystems are out in the ocean and far, far better for the environment than any kind of fossil fuel. So, you know, some, it’s really weird that the environmental groups were against it, but it goes back to a period in the late sixties when the a faction of environmentalists led by David Brower, who’s the head of the Sierra Club and involving Paul Ehrlich, a professor at Stanford who wrote the book, the Population Bomb which David Brower was kind of the instigator of and worked with Ehrlich on it.

And they thought that there were too many people. and that the more people there were, the more resources they would use and the Earth’s resources were finite. So that was the model. Growth was going to run up against these resource limits that were inevitable. And they didn’t see that resources were not limited because technology could open up new resources.

Innovation could make more resources available. So for instance, on food, Paul Ehrlich said in his book that hundreds of millions of people were going to starve to death and they’re going to be these waves of, of, Death and starvation that’s going to depopulate the poor countries and of course that didn’t happen at all.

It’s completely wrong. We have You know, way higher population now and way fewer starving people in the world because the Green Revolution made, you know, more food accessible. But their thought was if there’s abundant clean energy, and that’s what nuclear was promising then that would mean people would, you know, if you have a lot of cheap electricity on your, your wall outlet, you’re going to want to plug stuff into it.

So. It would mean more stuff, more consumption, more people, and that would strain the earth’s resources. So originally that was it. It was that nuclear is going to be too cheap, too, too abundant. It’s going to be too good. Too good. Right. And they didn’t want something good. They wanted to run up against these limits and show us that we had to stop growing and we needed fewer people.

I don’t know how they were going to get that. And, and use less stuff. This is still a big theme of theirs, you know. Can de growth consume less and all of that energy efficiency. And meanwhile, these people who didn’t starve to death back then have grown in the societies throughout the world. Most of the world’s population by a good margin are in countries that are pretty poor, but growing and people are getting their feet under them.

Hundreds of millions of people coming out of poverty, especially in China and into kind of middle class life. And they’re doing it by using more energy, and they’re doing it with the cheapest, most practical energy they have, which is fossil fuels. So the, the environmental position, you know, led directly to this continued reliance on fossil fuels.

And if you wind back the clock to before that, back to the 1960s, people In government and nuclear industry, the planners were figuring that we, we, in the United States followed by the rest of the world, we’re going to make a transition off of fossil fuels and onto nuclear energy because it was going to be cheaper and more practical and better all around.

And if we had just stayed with the program that we were on, then we literally wouldn’t have the climate crisis now, you know, like most of the CO2. Up. There is now been put in since then because we didn’t do nuclear and we kept burning more and more fossil fuel. And now, you know, by fast forward to today, we’re still burning more fossil fuel than ever.

And yes, we’re adding a lot of clean energy too. It’s growing really fast, but it’s only just keeping up with the growth of demand. People in poor countries are using more and more energy as they. Get less poor. And so electricity is growing and part of that is renewables, but not enough to take down the fossil fuel part.

So we’re still like 80 some percent fossil fuel in the world economy. And when we’re burning more coal than ever, it’s slowed down, but that’s not the point. We have to stop burning it because every coal you burn puts CO2 up in the atmosphere. So. Yeah, so that’s that’s where you you realize like there’s not many ways to get out of that problem You can’t tell the people in the poor countries to stop growing to use less electricity People who are already using far less that in the richer countries and you know, that’s morally wrong And so you have to have a way that they can use more electricity But not have it come from fossil fuels and there’s very few ways To do that, you know, and really only one proven way.

And that’s what France and Sweden did. So that’s, that’s the rationale behind it.

[00:22:21] Mark Hinaman: I do find there’s two points that I want to touch on. Number one, the Rockefeller point, and I want to pick your brain about this quickly. But number two this irony now that a lot of the fossil fuel development has occurred maybe not directly correlated, but like some of the messaging that.

The environmental groups, the rock, Rocky mountain Institute, the rock defense fund the Sierra club green piece, right? Being anti nuclear and being pro renewable has been so good. It’s been one of the best things for the oil and gas industry globally. Yeah. I mean, like we have produced so much more of it because we haven’t used.

The even more energy dense source,

[00:23:05] Joshua Goldstein: right? Right, right. And it’s a little more to it than that too, because first of all you, you list off those groups, but when you start adding up their budgets, it’s just an enormous amount of money. It’s just billions and billions of

[00:23:18] Mark Hinaman: dollars. That’s not a charity, right?

This is, this is a real business. Yeah. And

[00:23:22] Joshua Goldstein: now they’re sort of paired up with With wind and solar industry, the renew, so called renewables industry and so it’s pretty direct, a lot of money involved, but, but just their budgets alone, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, et cetera. And the money that’s gone to make everyone afraid of nuclear power.

It’s really hard to get a counter message out. It’s the, it’s, you know, a billion dollars a year or something. It’s the level of a U. S. presidential campaign, right? So, imagine you’re running for president. Nobody’s heard of you and you don’t have any money and you’re up against a billion dollar budget to demonize you.

You know, you’re not going to win that election. So, that’s, that’s what we’ve been up against. And why would you change your

[00:24:03] Mark Hinaman: messaging when you’re getting a billion dollars? It’s like, well, it worked on last year’s budget. It, It’s illogical to modify our message if we’re continuing to get donations, right?

And I

[00:24:13] Joshua Goldstein: can’t prove it, but I think that is certainly heard. I’ve heard that the Many of the leaders in these organizations know that they’re wrong on the issue now, but they have big donors who are committed to it They have big anonymous donors so we don’t really know where that money’s coming from but you know You lose a lot of money when you you spend 50 years making someone afraid of something and hype them up They have to Give you all their money because it’s such a terrible threat.

And then you say, Oh, by the way, we changed our mind. It’s not such a threat. You’re going to stop

[00:24:44] Mark Hinaman: giving you money, right? I actually, it’s the best thing ever. We’ve got to really chase it now. Right. Right. I, I do see a lot of millennials and Gen Zers calling out this hypocrisy, right? Yeah. Meaning these are quote environmental groups that our.

That are pushing a clean energy movement and they’re omitting the best tool in the toolbox, you know, and it’s good. I think it’s good that they’re, these people are being called out for this hypocrisy, but, yeah

[00:25:14] Joshua Goldstein: replanet campaign called dear green piece. It’s been great, you know, just, yeah, love those dear green piece.

You’re great. We love you, but. He really screwed up on this one issue, wanted to change it, you know, that’s how I feel. And I’m a lifetime member of the Sierra Club. I love the Sierra Club and everything they do, except on this issue, they’re just dead wrong. But it’s such an important issue that really troubles me.

I can’t just kind of say, well, you know, I don’t agree with them on this, but everything else. Okay. This

[00:25:46] Mark Hinaman: is the heart of everything. You got this cognitive dissonance, right? Like, yeah. Okay. So I wanted, I wanted to circle back real quick. So the, the rock, you mentioned Rockefeller. When I’ve looked into it, and I’m curious on your research on this yeah, John D Rockefeller made gobs of money in oil, right?

The original oil tycoon. But I perceived when I read the history that his children’s and the foundation were kind of felt guilty for how much wealth they had accumulated from fossil fuels and weren’t necessarily completely behind the fossil fuel movement anymore. And so I, I don’t know if that when, when I’ve heard people come out in, in the pro nuclear industry and say, well, fossil fuels don’t, don’t, people don’t like this because it’s, it’s just going to put them out of business.

I, I personally disagree with that. So I’m curious on your perspective and what kind of research or evidence you found that shows otherwise, or was there active campaigns?

[00:26:40] Joshua Goldstein: I have a nuanced view of it. It’s a little bit complex and I, I wouldn’t actually be wanting to demonize the fossil fuel.

Industry for this, but the, the Rockefeller foundation did do something really bad here. They. I can’t say the family told them to do it. It was closely tied to the family. But their whole way of life was fossil fuels. And so that, that may have influenced them. But what they, what they said was was this guy Fosdick was running the foundation and then this guy Warren Weaver, a mathematician, was their head of natural sciences.

And Basically, Fosdick told Warren Weaver to go make everyone afraid of radiation, I’ll give you the detail of it, but the reasoning behind it was they felt bad that they had played a role in the Manhattan Project to create the bomb in World War II. And the guy who they had funded generously, who had come through the critical thing, his cyclotron to, that was, you know, he said like, no Rockefeller Foundation, no bomb, you know?

Could they? played a critical role there. That’s right. And they said, Oh, what have we done? What have we created? Because, you know, a lot of the scientists, my uncle was one who worked at Los Alamos and was later a big anti nuclear war advocate. You know, a lot of them felt they had created a

[00:28:04] Mark Hinaman: technology.

I think almost everyone on the Manhattan project, not everyone. Teller was bigger and bigger bombs. Here we go. Many of them. Yeah. It

[00:28:10] Joshua Goldstein: came out. So this is the Rockefeller. People were immediately, you know alarmed that they may have done something bad and they felt guilty about it. So what they did was they found, in 1944, a scientist named Muller, Herman Muller, who had, he had done the original work irradiating fruit flies in the late 1920s in the Columbia University, the Fly Room.

This thing, it should be a movie I’d like to make, I’d like to make a movie out of it. Maybe, maybe it won’t be me. But it’s, it’s interesting characters. So, so Muller had irradiated flies and claimed that he had created mutations. And they, they didn’t know what DNA was yet. They knew there was something called a gene that They knew there was material there that was shaping what the organism came out like.

And he could blast these fruit flies with radiation and make them have, you know, eyes where their wings should be in these weird mutations. And, and spooky, you know, scary mutations. So it turned out to fast forward that what he was doing was blasting them with super high doses of radiation and just blowing away whole sections of their chromosomes.

It was not making little mutations in the DNA

[00:29:30] Mark Hinaman: that the NRC is protecting against today. Right. Right. Right.

[00:29:34] Joshua Goldstein: So, but his theory of it was that he was producing these point mutations with radiation and the whole role of radiation in evolutionary history was that that’s how species were evolving by having these mutations from radiation.

All this, it turned out it was all wrong. And don’t get me started on this topic. I will, you know, we’ll run out of time. But the essence of it was that he had done this work and then had gone off to the Soviet Union because he admired Stalin and stuff and then he discovered, no, he didn’t like Stalin and it was bouncing around during the war.

He got a job in Amherst College and he was a bad teacher and they were firing him. So at the time that the Rockefellers, you know. Took up his cause 1944 he was broke. He was divorced. He was unemployed, you know, just a down on his luck scientist and the Rockefellers at that time Governments were not the main ones funding science in the United States.

It was these foundations. So the Rockefellers put him in a tenured position at Indiana University. They made a deal with the university, they paid his salary, they paid his lab, all the people who worked in his lab, his travel budget, you know, everything. It’s all paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation and Indiana University is like, sure, why not?

So then they set him up there. And and then everyone was freaked out about the bomb, and so the Nobel Prize in 1945 went to Muller because of this discovery about the dangers of radiation, which was on everybody’s mind then. So he goes to give his Nobel Prize speech, and he’s got letters from some of his…

colleagues that saying, you know, they, they didn’t reproduce his results. They don’t find that low level radiations causing harm. His theory was that if this dose that he gave caused X amount of harm, then half the dose would cause half of X and so forth, linear. Curve all the way down to zero. So one little beam of light could knock out one little piece of the genetic material and cause a mutation.

And so he was very attached to this idea. And that’s probably what the Rockefellers liked about him because it would make everyone afraid of radiation. And of course the fallout. From the, from the test, the fallout was a case of low level radiation. But all the evidence about harm came from high level radiation.

Primarily, you know, like fruit flies blasted with really high doses. He couldn’t get, he couldn’t show any harm from low doses. He used high doses and extrapolated them. And then the bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they got high level radiation and you could see harm was caused there and, you know, at a certain high dose.

[00:32:21] Mark Hinaman: I’ve looked at that data. I agree. High level radiation is very dangerous.

[00:32:26] Joshua Goldstein: Yeah. And then a little bit lower, there was leukemia out of it. And then you go lower than that and you start to lose any, any harm. You’ve got this theory that low level radiation causes harm to human health, but you can’t measure it.

It’s too, nobody’s ever pro proven that it exists because the levels, the low levels don’t create enough of an effect to to measure. Yeah. So to me, that’s not science. You know? Like we know this is out there, but we can’t measure it, so we’re just gonna say it’s there. But the Rockefeller Foundation continued to support him, and he was a major figure.

In the field of genetics, which was entirely funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. So everybody in that field is funded by them and they were creating it with him at the head of the field. They had a conference in the 1950s, mid 50s, called the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation. And they And they proposed this to the National Academy of Sciences and said, we’ll pay for it all, the Rockefellers.

So, just like Indiana University, like, okay. So now you’ve got the Academy of Sciences on it and they have six groups looking at different aspects of the effects of radiation. At least one of which were actual biologists who knew something about that. But, and they, Discovered, you know, we don’t see any effect of low level radiation, but the one of the groups was the genetics group.

And that was all these people, including Muller and all the Muller followers. And instead of having it chaired by a geneticist, Warren Weaver himself from the Rockefeller Foundation comes in and chairs it. And he tells them things like, if this comes in, it comes out, right. There’s going to be a lot of money in it for all of you.

And he’s funding all these people. He knows what the result he wants. And, and they just steamrolled over the contrary evidence and came out with a report, five of the six committees not finding any harm. And one of them saying, yes, the one chaired by Weaver said it was the one chaired by Weaver says any level of radiation is harmed a human health.

And that’s the one that it gets into the front page of the New York times, you know, the next day. And the one that. We all remember so then the whole regulatory framework comes about with nuclear power. And it’s all based on this idea of linear, no threshold that as low as you go on your dose, you’re just getting less of the same harm.

And it’s, it’s all based explicitly on a theory of human biology that says that DNA cannot be repaired. This is what Muller said. Harm to DNA is irreparable. It’s cumulative over your life. It doesn’t matter if you get a dose all at once or spread out over time because you can’t repair it anyway,

[00:35:21] Mark Hinaman: which we know is exactly

[00:35:22] Joshua Goldstein: wrong.

And now we know it’s completely no, it’s proven wrong. They’ve given the Nobel prize about eight years ago to for DNA repair mechanisms. Which are extensive and wondrous. And you know, the body’s really complicated. But one thing is, you know, we evolved on a planet full of radiation and we evolved mechanisms to keep the DNA kicking along, even when it gets knocked out from radiation, more often from oxidation than radiation.

But anyway, DNA does repair itself. So here we’ve got a whole theory that we know explicitly is contrary to the science. And yet the regulatory bodies. Have kept it in place to this day, linear, no threshold. I sometimes call it straight, no chaser for no good reason.

[00:36:06] Mark Hinaman: You know, all the way down

[00:36:10] Joshua Goldstein: And and so it means that if you’re designing a nuclear power plant, You have to protect against any release of any radiation.

And, you know, you can’t do that with like an oil refinery. Like, we’ll never ever spill oil from an oil refinery anywhere in the world. If we do, the whole industry has to shut down. And it’s completely impractical to run things that way. And none of the competing power sources have that, you know. A hydroelectric dam will never burst.

If a hydro dam bursts, we got to get rid of all the hydro dams. But that’s the attitude towards nuclear. And even the tiniest, it was like just seeing the latest thing I saw was, it was headlines in the newspaper because some, I forget which nuclear plant, had a backup system in case. Things went wrong, which they didn’t, and then the backup system relied on generators, you know, to keep the core from overheating.

And the generators relied on diesel fuel that was carried in pipes, and they had found some cracks in some of the pipes. It wasn’t that the pipes weren’t working, they found cracks in them, right? And so it’s like, oh no, you know, stop the world. We have to fix the cracks in case, you know, this series of things happens that might possibly lead to a release.

which is considered to be catastrophic and people don’t understand radioactivity and partly because of this rockefeller foundation story we’re we’re all trained to be afraid of radioactivity and radiation But we don’t Treated as though there was a dose we treat it as though it’s it’s a sort of categorical thing if any gets out Then it’ll destroy the world and this is how they treat, you know, nuclear spent fuel like you can put it underground But if a hundred thousand years from now some gets out then that’s going to be somehow catastrophic, you know, that’s completely false completely wrong But that that’s how it is.

It’s like radioactivity. It’s an absolute and that’s what the Rockefellers wanted The foundation, they wanted people to have this kind of absolute aversion and taboo on anything nuclear, anything about radiation and radioactivity. And I guess to their credit, we haven’t blown up the world with a nuclear war.

So, you know, maybe they’re right about that. But, you know, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, you know, the price we’ve paid has just been horrific because it’s locked in place climate change and fossil fuels for all these decades. And now we’re trying to find our way out of that.

[00:38:37] Mark Hinaman: Well, that’s what a podcast like this are meant to do, right?

Educate people and change it. So, and things like your book and a nuclear net, right? So let’s, let’s chat about a bright future. Can you give a synopsis for the audience and yeah, you released this in 2019. Yeah.

[00:38:54] Joshua Goldstein: So I was learning about nuclear energy and I learned about the case of Sweden, Sweden has a, I have a soft spot for Sweden because it’s come up in a couple of my books, the war and gender book, and also the diplomacy and, and peace book keep coming back to Sweden.

So I was in Sweden talking about war and gender. And I had the chance to go visit the nuclear power plant at Ringholz, which I write about in the book and compare with a German coal plant, which is quite a comparison. You know, it’s like, couldn’t have two more different facilities in terms of the environmental impact of them on climate change and everything else.

But but I, I was interested in how Sweden had built these plants quickly and decarbonized the grid. And I came across the writings from a Swedish nuclear engineer, Staffan Kvist, who was writing academic articles on how the rest of the world could do what Sweden did. And I’m like, that’s, that’s what I want to write the book about.

So I contacted him and said, ask if he wanted to collaborate on the book. And he did. So that was great for me because I’m a political scientist and I don’t have the chops to, to make sure everything is right. I do have the instinct to make sure I don’t have mistakes in my work, and I’m very careful about stuff especially if there’s data involved very careful.

If you read my book, it better have the right story, you know. So with, with Stefan, I could get the right story, and he could make sure that it’s all correct and scientifically accurate, which then I was able to do with the film for Oliver. So, that was the story of the book, we wrote it up, it starts out, it’s It’s probably too cute, but we use a gimmick where the word nuclear never appears in the title, the subtitle, the back cover, the front material, the jacket, flaps, or the entire first two chapters.

The first chapter is about climate change and how urgent it is, which I feel strongly, more so now than you know, five years ago or 10 years ago, 30 years ago, and I’ve been watching it the whole time and really concerned that it’s, it’s off track. We’re off track. So that’s the first chapter of climate change, very serious problem.

And and the second chapter is about Sweden, but in that second chapter, it’s about how Sweden discovered a almost magical energy source called Kernkraft that would power their, Grid without producing carbon dioxide or noxious particulate matter, blah, blah, blah. It’s so environmental. It’s so great.

And then at the, you know, like the last sentence of the chapter is, of course current craft means nuclear power in Swedish, right? So , yeah, I think occasionally somebody actually didn’t quite get where it was going, but most of the time. I figured they know it’s about nuclear power, but it doesn’t hit the brain.

You know, the word nuclear, and this is changing just in the last few years, but at that time I really felt the word nuclear landed in people’s brains in a way that would. You know ping their trauma about it and that it was better to talk about it without triggering that using the trigger word I don’t think that’s true anymore.

And obviously the film nuclear now, you know, we’re past that stage

So now there’s, the taboo is starting to lift, but it’s still pretty strong. You read articles about climate change and they just never mention nuclear power.

It’s so frustrating. And sometimes they’ll say, you know, where we get our energy from is this amount from natural gas and this amount from coal and this from solar, wind and hydroelectric. And you go, wait, that doesn’t add up. We’re missing 20 percent is nuclear power. And these don’t, they can’t bring themselves to use the word.

It’s a real taboo. It goes back to that Rockefeller foundation thing that the fear, radiation, radioactivity, nuclear. And so journalists often just. Don’t talk about it. It’s something you don’t talk about. And that was part of the point of the book and the movie, was to get it out in the open now. In the last few years, there’s been a lot of change on that.

You know, the taboo is lifting and people are talking about it openly now. To some extent. And yet, still most of what you read about climate solutions, it just assumes that we build a lot of solar and wind and a lot of transmission lines and then everything will be cool.

[00:43:28] Mark Hinaman: I think it takes a long time for society to have these feedback loops, right?

I remember graduating from school and I was like, there’s no way that climate change or wind and solar are going to make a dent. You know, and here we are a decade later and the Inflation Reduction Act passes and, and I’m, I’m like, wow, did definitely made a wrong bet here. I definitely underestimated how much people would care about this moving forward.

Right. I just thought, you know, people would care about cost and price more.

[00:43:58] Joshua Goldstein: But then you look at Germany, for example, and, you know, eventually late in the process of closing all their nuclear power down, they started to wonder if that was such a good idea, but they still just went ahead and closed everything down.

So that’s. That’s pretty hard. And then replaced it with coal because they were going to replace it all with cheap Russian gas. What could go wrong? And so then when they didn’t have that, it’s it’s coal. Yeah, and it’s still so much coal and gas and oil around the world, especially in the poorer countries.

So this gets to something that that bugs me in the whole discourse about climate change and clean energy, which is that the Rich countries are like 1 billion out of the 8 billion people on the planet. And the poorest of the poor are another billion that just don’t have electricity, pretty much. And then in between is 6 billion people that are…

They have some electricity, they need more, they want more, they want to get a refrigerator, you know, and that kind of thing. It’s not just a light bulb to read by, that’s great for, you know, kids in school, but you want a refrigerator and then you’re going to want all the other things that, that go with electricity.

So yeah, the, the conversation is as though the mill, the billion rich people are what’s going to determine the outcome in climate change. And even to the point of, like, the state of Massachusetts thinks, like, if we build a bunch of wind and solar, that’s where I live, Massachusetts. If we build a bunch of wind and solar, then, you know, we can decarbonize Massachusetts, and then we’re doing our part, and that’ll solve climate change.

And it’s very urgent. In order to solve climate change, Massachusetts has to build a bunch of wind and solar. Yeah. Well, I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to build it. I happen to think it is, but you know, the point is that it’s not going to make any difference to the outcome. And so a place like Massachusetts and really the whole billion rich people should be doing is to create the tools by which those 6 billion people can grow and enjoy energy and grow up out of poverty into prosperity without burning fossil fuels.

It means we need to be creating new technologies that can work in those parts of the world because it’s really expensive to do it the way we’re trying to do it in Massachusetts or Germany. You know, Germany, maybe they can afford it, or maybe all their industry is going to move to France where electricity is cheaper, but but, but you know, Indonesia cannot afford it.

Absolutely cannot. And if you give them a choice of clean, beautiful electricity powered by wind, solar, and batteries that 0. 10 a kilowatt hour or 0. 20, I think we’re paying 0. 20 for offshore wind here in Massachusetts. You know, versus coal at 0. 05, they’re going to burn coal, and I can’t blame them. You know, that’s not, you can’t just tell those poor countries that they can’t do it because we’ve used up all the carbon that the atmosphere can handle.

Yeah. So, so we need a way, we need something cheap. So this is my nuclear power pitch to the nuclear industry is make it cheap. It’s got to be, we’ve got to figure a way to do this cheaper. And part of that is getting over the radiation fear that leads to this over regulation. That means that every power plant needs to be, you know, spending tons of money to prevent tiny amounts of radiation from being released.

And part of it is just that the industry needs to focus more on cheap solutions that will work around the world.

[00:47:40] Mark Hinaman: Yeah. Be great at building projects, deliver stuff on time, under budget.

[00:47:45] Joshua Goldstein: Right. Some of those are happening. I mean, there’s some progress. The nuclear plant in the United Arab Emirates, as you know, South Koreans came in and built that on time, on budget.

It’s not as cheap as it would need to be, but it’s getting in that direction. And then the anti nuclear people always point to this. The plant that just opened in Georgia, the Votal plant, which was just a fiasco, it was the first try in 30 years, and everything went wrong, and the regulation set it off track, and the people building it screwed it up too, and the whole thing’s just been The wrong model and it ended up really expensive and then they’re like see nuclear is too expensive to be helpful for climate change Well that that one plant is if they were all like that.

I wouldn’t you know, we wouldn’t be having this conversation because we need something cheaper, but then at the other extreme is these plans on floating nuclear plants built in shipyards mass produced But one way or the other we need to get to mass manufacture Low cost nuclear power plants and I like the floating plants built in shipyards a lot and then, you know, send them where they’re going But what however you go and there’s some other ways to do it.

It’s got to be cheap It’s got to be mass manufactured and it has to be something that you can really use all around the world and then you can Really start to knock out coal plants the way places like Ontario did, you know, and and it A little more than a decade. They knock coal out by expanding their nuclear or France, just decarbonizing in 15 years.

So,

[00:49:18] Mark Hinaman: so can I try and trace this back with, with, so can I try and trace this back with you then? Like, so they, I mean, I mean, we, we want to build more nuclear decarbonized, but it’ll be better if we can Replace or build those systems before we shut down other existing energy systems in the poorer parts of the world, you know, it feels immoral to shut those systems down first, but we have to build as much as we can.

We have to make it cheap. And in order to do, to do that, we have to perhaps peel back some regulation allow people to innovate, allow us to export stuff. And in order to peel back the regulation, we got to have conversations like this, right. And make films like nuclear now and write books like bright future.

Right. So, right.

[00:50:06] Joshua Goldstein: Has that’s the program.

[00:50:10] Mark Hinaman: That’s why we’re here.

[00:50:11] Joshua Goldstein: I’m all for the other things that. That there’s a lot going on in climate change and more each year and you know, I’m a big fan of deep geothermal I’m a fan of Natural gas with carbon capture. That’s really promising and Wind and solar, when they’re a small part of the grid, they’re, they can be really cheap until they start to really screw up the grid and you need this expensive storage and transmission and all that stuff that they’re trying to do here.

But, you know, in relatively small amounts, they’re pretty good. I, I drive an electric car, I have solar up on my roof, you know. So, They’re all good, but point is you do all that stuff and you realize with a growing energy system in the world You’re just barely keeping up with growth. You’re not getting the Decarbonization that we need I’m just not getting there And we’re maybe going to get halfway there with all our most ambitious efforts.

And you look into the bag of tricks, like, what else do we have in here? And there’s nothing in there but nuclear power. And you go, okay, this other half of this problem has to be solved with nuclear. Has to be, people who say they’re, either they say, I’m not against nuclear power, but, or they say, like, I’m pro nuclear, I, I think it’s an important.

piece of the solution or something, but they’re really talking about like nuclear power to fill in the last 10 or 20 percent of things after you just can’t get there with all this other expensive stuff. And I don’t see it that way. I see it as, you know, the other stuff should be the first thing we’re building.

Yeah. The opposite. Yeah. Like do everything we can with nuclear power. I’ll give you a specific example on that if you want to the Bill Gates company TerraPower is building a reactor in Wyoming. It’s a big coal place, so that’s, that’s great. And they’re building it at a retiring coal plant, which was a good model.

They have. These molten salt storage tanks so that they can run the reactor around the clock, which is what it does best. But then store the energy when there’s low grid demand and give it back when there’s high grid demand. By the way, also, you know, store it when the price is low. For selling it and then sell it when the price is high.

So it’s a good economic model for them. They always pitch it as, you know, this is going to work well with wind and solar on the grid. Renewables that come and go and I guess to a certain extent that’s true. If you can store some and then let it out when it’s needed. That is, but I started to think actually that would work the best for an all nuclear grid.

Because you’ve got these day night variations that are very predictable in the grid. You can’t predict when the wind and sun are going to. So if the suddenly the wind stops blowing and the sun isn’t shining, that that’s too much for this storage of the nuclear plant to make up for. It’s only sort of moderate amounts.

But what it reminds me of is the plant near me that has shut down unnecessarily, Vermont Yankee. When they built that, they also built a pumped storage. Hydro system nearby where they pump water up the mountain during at night when there’s a lot of electricity from the nuclear plant not much demand and then in the day when there’s more demand they let the water down from the mountain and generate extra electricity that way and that handles the day night cycle and it’s it’s wonderful for the grid it’s really stable it’s really easy you don’t need all this very complicated transmission and storage stuff that the wind and solar need so I don’t know the I’m not sure what the right mix would be and it’s going to be different in different places, but I really feel like nuclear should be the backbone of a clean energy economy.

Yeah.

[00:54:00] Mark Hinaman: Well, I think you and I agree there. What, what’s been the feedback from nuclear now? Has it been well received? I personally, I loved it. Yeah. I heard about it coming out long before it was released and I was annoyed at how long it took you guys to get it out. I was like, how do I watch this film?

I want to watch this film.

[00:54:21] Joshua Goldstein: Very frustrating. So really two answers to that. Among the people who have watched it, it’s been extremely well received. And, you know, we released it first at the Venice Film Festival a year ago, and it was a thousand people in a theater. First time we showed it on a screen in front of an audience, and you never know how it’s going to go.

So, it was a ten minute standing ovation. So, that was good. Of course, the Italians are enthusiastic about cinema anyway. But, basically, we got it. Basically, we’ve had a very, very good response when it’s shown. And it was a New York Times Critics Pick. A very positive review on it. Some of the reviews were like, surprised because Oliver Stone seems very reasonable and down to earth here and unlike some of his other movies.

I don’t know. He’s a really good filmmaker and he’s a really smart guy. And I completely disagree with him on some other issues that he likes to mouth off about. But as far as making a great film, he, he really did a wonderful job. So that’s the good side. And then the bad side is the distribution channels wouldn’t take it.

And we went out to sell it after Venice and I didn’t but you know, the Hollywood people and everybody was turning it down. They all turned it down because they’re afraid of nuclear. Don’t like the controversy. I think Hollywood ever since me too. They’re sort of in a play it safe mode Don’t want to get in trouble Oliver Stone could be troubled nuclear energy could be trouble So yeah They just wouldn’t buy it and Netflix wouldn’t put it on and so forth and then eventually we got a distribution deal where we came out in a couple of theaters for a week and like in New York and a bunch of theaters, 400 theaters in North America, but only for one night only.

So, and those varied a lot from, you know, sold out and a lively discussion afterwards to, you know, basically an empty theater, but it got it out there. And then eventually. Pretty soon after that got to Amazon and Apple TV pay per view. That’s probably where you were able to see it I don’t know where

[00:56:29] Mark Hinaman: you saw it, but I know we had a watch party.

We We sold out a theater to go and watch it, you know, Colorado nuclear alliance So our you know, the advocacy group that we helped out with here. It was like, yeah, here we go

[00:56:42] Joshua Goldstein: Yeah, that’s great. And so we had some really wonderful screenings, and we had the kind of flagship screening in Washington, D. C. at the Navy Memorial, which I was at, and Oliver, and you know, a lot of D.

C. people, some in the nuclear industry, and some in, you know, Congress and journalists and stuff. That went really well. It came out on DVD, so that’s another way people can see it now, but the international distribution Only just getting started now, and I’m with you. I’m so frustrated that it took so long and I wish everyone in the world could see it.

We were talking at one point about trying to raise some money and, you know, buy the rights to the film and put it on YouTube for free for everyone in the world to see. It may yet get there in the end, but they, they’re doing something more traditional with it. And it’s got distribution deals now in everywhere from.

A number of European countries to South Korea, Australia. And some in between a bunch of countries, not Germany, they didn’t want it. That’s so weird man, that’s so weird. I think it will percolate its way out and, you know, for me not being part of Hollywood, this being my only film and all, there’s really nothing I can do about it.

I don’t understand the whole distribution side of, I don’t understand that making side of movies either, but I did participate in that. But distribution, it’s another whole world, how you get, how you get people to have heard of the movie and to have a chance to, to see it. I think over time, it’ll get out there to a wider audience.

Okay.

[00:58:26] Mark Hinaman: Well, we, we, you’ve hit most of the questions that we had and a few more that we didn’t. So I thank you so much for your work. I just, you know, I was being part of the pro nuclear advocacy movement and wanting to work in the space and build stuff in the industry. I, it’s people like you that are really making a difference in helping to carry the story further.

[00:58:44] Joshua Goldstein: So I think that the biggest difference the film made was for people who were already pro nuclear, but maybe thought they were the only ones who were in their crowd or, you know, didn’t feel. Brave enough to stick their necks out or talk about it, whatever. It’s just like put a, a tailwind behind the whole pro nuclear movement and gave people a tool they could use to show other people, you know, what it is they believe in that may be complicated to explain.

So I think that’s been really good to show support to those of you that are already out there doing this work. And you know, Hey, here’s a film you can use.

[00:59:22] Mark Hinaman: We appreciate it. Thank you. Dr. Goldstein, leave us with your most positive view of the future. What’s the world going to look like in the next 10 to 20 years and how are we going to help get it there?

[00:59:32] Joshua Goldstein: I think 10 years is probably the wrong time frame because climate change is going to play out slower than that. I know it’s like climate change is here, we should all be in a panic, and I sort of feel we should be in a panic, but only because things we do now are going to affect the world of 50 to 100 years from now.

That’s when it’s really going to be. Really serious. Like if this was what we’re having now, big fires and hurricanes is all we had to deal with. We’d be okay, but we’re going to have real destabilizing stuff 50 years from now. And so the second half of the century and on into next century. And I have a granddaughter now is one year old.

So I’m thinking in that frame, you know, her next 100 years is going to be dominated by this issue. So The 10 years is not the right frame. And that’s like, we only have 10 years, build a bunch of wind and solar. Cause that’s the fastest way to get energy on the grid right now. Like, okay. But if you built nuclear, then 15 or 20 years, you’d have a lot more.

So I think the 2030s, 2040s, that’s when nuclear is going to start to shine. And my vision of the future is that. There’s a technological style, some people call it, of like how technologies underpin an economy and work together. And I see nuclear emerging as the core energy technology in the world. As it was imagined 50, 70 years ago getting back to that vision of things.

But to my mind, fossil fuels are ripe for disruption. They’re dirty, they’re expensive. They’re annoying, you know, they’re so cumbersome with all this volume of stuff you have to dig up and burn and the waste and all of that. And that’s a multi trillion dollar a year industry. So. That somebody’s gonna make a lot of money on nuclear, right?

Because you’ve got a something that’s ripe for disruption. If you figure out this kind of mass manufactured Low cost nuclear that sells around the world you’re gonna make a ton of money and you’re gonna save the planet So that’s my happy vision for for somebody making money won’t be me. I don’t I have no financial interest in Anything nuclear.

I want to be a professor and be, you know, objective about the subject. But but I think it’ll be good that investors who go into nuclear do make money. Some of them will lose their shirts, of course. But overall, I see a big change there of the economy. Reorienting off of fossil fuels and onto nuclear.

It’s going to take some decades to do that though, obviously.

[01:02:09] Mark Hinaman: Dr. Goldstein. Thanks so much for the time. This has been great.

[01:02:12] Joshua Goldstein: It’s been fun to be with you. Thanks for a good conversation.

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