I Don't Know About That - Nuclear Power

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

In this episode, the team gets their minds blown about nuclear power by our former moon landing expert, Dr. Kevin Peter Hickerson. Follow Kevin on Instagram and Twitter @kphickerson! Make sure to check out Kevin and Jimmy O Yang's podcast "Surely You're Joking," which features Nobel prize winners, scientists, and comedians. Our merch store is now live! Go to idontknowaboutthat.com for shirts, hoodies, mugs, and more! Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/IDKAT for ad free episodes, bonus episodes, and more exclusive perks! Tiers start at just $2!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

space time what's all that about you might find out and i don't know about that space and time what is all that about jack started the song very quickly we haven't got louise anymore so we uh i so I didn't find my words. I was bang straight into it. You're the one going, all right, let's go, let's go, hurry up. Yeah, I was. I was.

I'm like a fucking director. We're losing light. It's been a couple of weeks now, Jack, but how did it go with the ramen? I want to first of all say how proud I am of Jack. He did wonderful. He did a wonderful bloody job. He did. He went out there and they were very good.

And they came out to begin with. There was no one really in the audience. And by the time they finished, the audience was 80% full. And they started. I saw the gig building. It started off with just background music, the people listening, the people clapping, the people cheering. I was very proud of him.

People were shouting out, like, after some lyrics, they go, whoo, which felt really cool. Mind you, his parents were in the audience doing a lot of those noises. Yeah, it was my family. But he also played the Bluebird Cafe, which is also another huge music venue, like a historic music venue. How did that go? That also went great.

How did you think the shows went? Just don't say great. Like give me a synopsis of your emotions. I was way less nervous to do the Ryman than I was the Bluebird because it felt like there was like no pressure to do the Ryman gig. And also your song, Please Tell Me You're Sleeping, crushed. Crushed? It crushed.

Oh, you wrote it? Yeah, we wrote it. I remember he... I mean, I remember Jim coming up with it. I didn't know that Jack actually made it into a song. Yeah, and I wrote it. That's amazing. Yeah, because Jim, you FaceTimed me.

All I want is a special thank you on that album. I don't want any money. You FaceTimed me, but it was choppy, so I couldn't watch it. Jim's like, I'll hear the song. That's amazing. We were really happy with it. It came out really well. And then Bluebird, we were shaking a little bit going up there. Because it's smaller? It's smaller. It was like 90 people, and

everyone before us kept going, I can't believe I'm playing the Bluebird tonight. This is like a Jim Country thank you, thank you. And we're like, we're out of town. Oh, God god and then they go these guys played the rhyming yesterday we're like oh no there's so much pressure and everyone in the place turned to us and started clapping we're like oh and that went well too that went well and they had a songwriter play after us who wrote i'd like to teach the world to sing

and some other big songs or some crystal gale songs and some john prine songs they must be all his bulls oh he's like 82 um but why is this rip that song off but he uh he he said we were great and we talked to him for a bit so that was really cool as well so love nashville that's a huge deal that city is insane thank you yeah nashville's if i always say nashville's my favorite city not near the water i've never been in nash my favorite city, not near the water. I've never been in Nashville. I like to be near the water. It's a bang in Nashville. You gotta go when you're drinking. Yeah, I'm sober right now.

It's not gonna... It wouldn't be the same. It's fun, huh? You can't go into a... Yeah, but I'm sober from weed, too. You can't go in... But you can't, like... You can't go into, like, a bar and there's bad music. It's, like, weird. It's, like, you just go in there and there's... It. It's weird. It's like you just go anywhere. It started at 10 a.m.

Every bar on Broadway has a band in it, and there's like 30 bars. I hate when you go to these places like Vegas and Nashville, and then you meet a local, and they're like, oh, I never go on the strip. I never go into Broadway. Like this, right? Well, the fuck live there. It's awesome awesome these things are

awesome it's like it's not you don't do it every night you don't do it every night but i you know like it's on hollywood boulevard here hollywood boulevard here there's nothing to do yeah and i remember one time we one time i was there with jim and we went and saw this band and they were called like the eskimo brother or something like that turns out they were like these studio musicians that have been like everybody's album or something. Like, you know, there's amazing musicians. I remember just watching them like, this band's one of the best bands I've ever heard. And it was like, and it's just like that everywhere you go.

And it's just like, it's just fun times. And they're working for fucking tips. Yeah. Yeah, because they're making their money elsewhere. You know, they're just doing this thing. And they have good food in Nashville. And it's like, it's just a fun time. Amos is walking around going, why don't Australians come here?

Because it's a bang. Amos is walking around going, why don't Australians come here? Because it's so weird. Like when you come from England or Australia or something, you come to America, everyone goes, I'll go to Orlando, and I'll go to LA, and I'll go to New York. And they're the places you go. And really. Orlando's a big one? Well, Disneyland.

Oh, just to visit, you mean. Yeah, but New Orleans is one that people should go to and Nashville is a city. New Orleans and Nashville are two bangers. And the thing about them is, and I think Nashville is better than New Orleans. It's a little bit more fun, I think. But the thing about going to those two places

is no one ever sort of thinks about it. You know what I mean? It's like you come to LA, what's there to do? If you live here, you know where to go. You go you know which restaurants are good whatever you don't have to live in those two cities they're like vegas you just you just walk along and you all go in there i'll do this nashville has definitely become the new bachelorette party destination one party stopped me they said hey you we need help finishing these white claws I said no problem that's when a girl's

hitting on you Jack and what did you do with that talked to him for a bit alright bit of progress there something to work from I was like I'm playing the rhyming tomorrow they go ooh what's that

never mind just say I play guitar and Jack bought himself a hat that was fashioned by the hat makers and then he gave them tickets to my show and they met me afterwards and they were like this we didn't know who you were we made Jack a hat we'll take a photo

with you and I'm like don't fucking put yourselves out maybe I'm not, don't fucking put yourselves out. I'm like, maybe I'm not your cup of tea, but you know, you took the tickets. Awesome. Jack got his tickets. They were these hipsters. I guess we'll take a photo.

Will ya? Yeah. You got some shows coming up this week in Columbus, Ohio. Yeah, baby. High ticket alerts still? High ticket alerts. We've actually moved a few. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We've moved a few. That's what happens when you do the alerts. High ticket alerts. There's still plenty of space. If you're morbidly obese and you think you can't get to comedy, I've got a row for you. As long as those armrests lift up. I can tell just by looking at the map you've been selling some tickets.

Yeah, yeah, I've been moving some tickets. Act fast. I've been moving some tickets. It still won't be sold out, but there's going to be a nice crowd. No, but it's filling up. I can see there. I mean, I can see the people't be sold out, but there's going to be a nice crowd. No, but it's filling up. I can see there. I mean, I can see the people. Pittsburgh sold out, and so we'll see you there.

Next day, October 28th, Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh sold out. All right, great. And then are there any tickets left for November 3rd, Toronto? There is some tickets the night before. Not a lot. That will sell out, but there's some tickets the night before. Okay, and then your specials.

The special tickets are all done. And Vegas, November 18th and 19th at the Mirage. There's tickets always available at Vegas, unless you get them like two days before. That's a couple of days before, but they always... People with Vegas tickets, it's always like, I'm going to go, and then what can we see, and all that type of stuff.

But yeah, I think it's already half sold or something like that. And Asia, South Korea, Japan Taiwan, Malaysia. After this podcast I'm about to do fucking two hours of Asian press Oh yeah? Yeah when I said fucking Asian press I didn't mean that I meant the

fucking goes towards the press There's two adjectives on press Yeah You're gonna be all over Asia Yeah so I gotta do I're gonna be all over asia yeah yeah so i gotta i gotta do uh yeah i'm gonna be all over asia and if you live in asia or you're an asian person who lives in asia come and see me i'll be in asia i'm doing all the towns i'll be i'll be anywhere you are if as long as you don't live in north korea i'm not going to north korea or china i'm not going to china i was going to go to china Or China. I'm not going to China.

I was going to go to China, but China makes me give a script of my dialogue. Fuck you, China. Close enough. I'm not doing that. If you're in China, just skip on over to Taiwan or Singapore. Taiwan, I'll be in Taiwan. Or Singapore.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah. Just hop, skip, and a jump. They have nothing. No problem with China, Taiwan. I'll be in Taiwan. Is it Taiwan, China? I'll be in Taiwan. Is it Taiwan, China? I'll be in Taiwan eating at the original Ding Dang Fung.

That's what I do. Ding Dang Fung. Yeah, not the one I go to. And I go over there and I eat that. And I can eat it here in LA. There's a couple of restaurants. And they've got it in Australia as well. But no, I've got to eat it at the original.

Better there. Better. The food in Taiwan is awesome. The food all over Asia never disappoints. I'm not a big Korean barbecue guy. I thought the Korean barbecue was... It was good, but you know we... I like kimchi though.

We went to that bar in Taiwan too. Remember they had all those weird drinks? You had the orange thing, right? That was in the tower. We had a mango beer slushie. Loved it. Yeah, it was good. It was a beer and they shoved a scoop

full of mango sorbet in the top. We were 108 stories up. Winner. Whoa. Pretty tall. Tai, it was good. It was a beer, and they shoved a scoop full of mango sorbet in the hot water. We were 108 stories up. Winner. Whoa. It's pretty tall. Taipei Tower or whatever. Taipei. Yeah, I would like to be traveling with my wife to Asia.

Yeah, you guys are doing a musical. Well, I enjoy my wife's company. That's why I married her. No, I'm saying when we were at the top of that building, you guys were doing a musical. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We wrote a musical called Taipei. Tai taipei yeah yeah taipei and taipei that's good yeah yeah and it was like one of those songs like new york new york it's a wonderful time

we'd open doors and we'd dance and spin around on the tower um but me and the wife i i enjoy traveling a bit i can't we can't do a baby through asia it's too it's too quick it's not asia as such it's just there's so many flights and also it's also on this tour i'm going from freezing to boiling hot yeah that would be a brutal travel i'm crossing the equator all the time back and forth oh you're freezing again are you you'll be hot tomorrow well the, the beginning, Seoul, South Korea will be freezing. That'll be very cold. And Tokyo will be chilly.

Taipei will be actually pretty nice. And then we go to Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia. Which will be wet. Boiling hot. Yeah, wet. Barley. Barley in December. Holy hell.

Denpasar. That's going to be aloha shirt wearing days yeah it's gonna be hot hot alright let's start this podcast we started it with ads

the bit that people enjoy let's do the ads the ads oh well and also follow us on Instagram at idcatpodcast and you can check out our Patreon

at patreon.com slash idcat listen to the Patreon man the Patreon's rocking along yeah please welcome our guest Dr. Kevin patreon.com slash idcat. Listen to the Patreon, man. The Patreon's rocking along. Yeah. Please welcome our guest, Dr. Kevin Peter Hickerson.

Hello, Dr. Kevin Peter Hickerson. Hey, Jim. Now it's time to play. Yes, no. Yes, no. Yes, no. Yes, no. Yes, no. I can't hear it.

Judging a book by its cover. Clunk. Okay. That was pretty much spot on. Was I in tune? No. I can hear it. I'll uptune it later.

This is our first repeat guest. I know, and I'm trying to remember what the last subject was. Moonlanding. Ah, yes, the moon landing. I knew it was something. We're talking about that again. We're talking about that again. We're not talking about it again, are we? No, we're not. I knew it was something. We're talking about that again. We're talking about that again. We're not talking about it again, are we?

No, we're not. Just seeing what you remember. Moon landing. When we run out of topics, that's what we should do is just do everything over again. It'll be new material. We didn't have Kevin here in person. It's very under-script.

Look at Kevin. You're sitting in front of a picture of a dodge and all of Jack's things. Are you Jack? Yeah. Okay. So it's a moon landing. So I got to think of something that's parallel to the moon landing.

Are we talking about walking on earth? There's some walking on earth involved. I don't know if the moon landing is going to help you necessarily. Does it involve engineering? Yes. All right. Does it involve engineering? Yes. All right. Does it involve mining? Yes.

All right. Is it mining? No. Is it diamonds? No, no. I've got a lot of theories on diamonds. I want to talk about diamonds. I don't understand why they fucking cost so much.

They last forever. There should be too many of them on Earth. We should just be handing them down why does every woman want a brand new diamond what's wrong with the old ones they're exactly the same as when they were first and where are they going where are they going save save this i promise i'm working on a diamond expert producing diamonds yet i they're scarce they should be everywhere okay so mining um mining you're onto something with mining you you mine something and then once you mine it if it's fucking bitcoin again i'm walking

out right now you mine something and then once you mine it you'll use it to do to make this your business you'll you you'll mine so is it it gasoline? Close. Yeah. All right, tell me then. Because if it's close to gasoline. I've got a hint for you. Homer Simpson. Ooh, Homer Simpson. It's donuts.

Homer Simpson mining gasoline. I said you're close with gasoline. Oh, nuclear power. There you go. The problem is I can't say nuclear right. I think I say it wrong. And when people say it the other way. Nuclear. There you go. The problem is I can't say nuclear right. I think I say it wrong. And when people say it the other way. Nuclear. Nuclear?

Nuclear, but a lot of people say nuclear. Nuclear. I was saying it right. Yeah. My first day of college, I learned this because somebody said, you say the word new, and then you say the word clear. And I never said it wrong after that. Nuclear.

Dr. Kevin Peter Hickerson is a nuclear physicist who was part of the team that brought something that's something yeah i see you're a married man wait i'm not done with this intro i wish you you wish you weren't sometimes so you could go into bars and just go i'm a nuclear physicist then she goes she goes, nuclear? And you go, idiot. He is part of the team that broke the world record for the best neutron lifetime measurement. That's not hard. And I know exactly what that means.

I don't know either. You can explain to us in a second. He is also a comedian and host of the Science and Comedy podcast, Surely You're Joking, created with Jimmy O. Yang, our friend, featuring Nobel Prize winners, scientists, and comedians. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram surely you're joking created with jimmy o yang our friend yeah featuring nobel prize winners scientists and comedians you can follow him on twitter and instagram at kp hickerson um what does that mean best neutron lifetime measurement you're asking me no i'm asking we can call you kevin right is that okay yeah it's easy it's better than the other ones so when you when you free a neutron from the nucleus whoa so all matter is made of

protons and neutrons and electrons you can free the neutron but it only lasts about 15 minutes and because it's so long and not so short you know it's it's actually hard to measure and and so the way we did is we froze them and put in a bottle and this method ended up being a much more accurate version than the previous attempts which didn't do that so um and we got three times better accuracy than the even the previous record what kind of bottle you put in a magnetic bottle okay my favorite you said a bottle i just that's what i imagine a very expensive magnetic box. A Mexican Coke bottle. That's the good stuff. Okay, we're going to ask Jim a bunch of questions about nuclear power.

No idea. Ask me what a proton is. No idea. I don't know what I'm going to ask you about what a proton is. Thank God. And then at the end, you're going to grade them as accuracy. Zero through 10. 10 is the best.

Kelly's going to grade them on confidence. I'm going to grade them on setter. We'll add those all together. Zero through 10, white power. It's not good. You don't want to have that. 11 through 20, power puff girls. 21 through 30, He-Man.

You know why? Why? What did he say? I have the power. How did he say it? I have the power. There you go say it? I have the power. There you go. Look, I'm a He-Man guy.

Even though I feel like Powerpuff Girls was better. I'm a He-Man guy. I was right in there. I love that shit. All right. What is nuclear power? It's a form of electricity that's caused by protons and neurons and all that type of stuff.

Neurons or neutrons. Yeah, from uranium being dug up from the ground, and it is a clean source of energy, and it has a bad name, and it should rebrand itself and not call itself nuclear power. What should they call it? Just fucking clean, no boom-boom power. Because everyone worries that it's going to cause trouble probably the simpsons have taught us that and then you have things like

earthquake in japan and then they have nuclear fallout and stuff like that like in australia we have so much uranium that's going unmined there is an argument that we should be running on nuclear power completely in australia but we don't do it because people are adverse to the word okay how does it work how does nuclear power work you put things in bottles and magnetic bottles and you shake them up and they go and then you wire up to it yeah yeah i don't think it's anything because splitting the atom makes the hydrogen bomb, which is a nuclear, I don't know. There's atoms.

Let's move on. What is nuclear fission? What? Nuclear fission. Nuclear vision is a thing that my optometrist, the new lens. Let's move on, Forrest. I don't know, man. I don't know.

What is a control rod? You act so fucking smart over there on your computer. I know a little bit about it, but I don't know. What is a control rod? It's that glowy stick at the beginning of The Simpsons that pops off the thing and then lands in the back of his jacket. Might be. I think it is.

What is yellow cake? That would be poppy seeds, lemon. Yeah. Okay. Where does uranium come from? The ground. Yes. Yeah, it's mine from the ground, my friend.

What is enriched uranium? That's uranium where they put fertilizer on top of it. Okay. Dynamic lifter, which is just chicken shit, you know. Okay. What happens with the waste generated from nuclear power? You put them in barrels and you dig them under the ground and you hope no one finds them.

That's historically what's happened. Well, there is. I don't think it ever goes away. I think that's one of the problems is they find it hard to get rid of. That's why there's the three-eyed fish, man, in The Simpsons. Who was the first to develop nuclear power? The Turkish. Okay.

I never get credit for it. They were the first, but they didn't have computers, so they couldn't tell anyone they've done it. And then it was ripped off by the Italians. And what was it used for? What was the first? Oh, make DeLoreans work in the 80s. Okay.

You're killing us. When was the first nuclear power plant built? Okay, so we know like, okay, so I think it would have been in Europe somewhere. I think. I don't know. Maybe it was in America. I'm going to say Austria. And how many...

It would have been Chernobyl. Maybe it was Chernobyl because that one was just so old. Wait, wasn't that question when? When. Oh, when. Yeah. Oh, thank you. When.

Austria. 1940. Okay. And how many nuclear power plants are there in the world? Oh, hundreds. I'm going to go 200. 200. And how much power worldwide do these supply

like of the worldwide power 15% what is advanced nuclear that's the one where they know they get rid of the waste and they got better systems they put a Brita filter at the bottom of one of those big stacks

gotta change it yeah but it's still alright that Brita filter at the bottom of one of those big stacks. Got to change it. Yeah, but it's still all right. You can, that Brita filter racket, it doesn't need to be changed that often. No? No, they change it. Has anyone else pissed into a Brita and then tried to drink it? No, but. Me neither.

There's a trend going around where people are pouring alcohol into the Brita and filtering it that way. And they say it just tastes like water and it's probably very dangerous because people are getting really fucked up. There's an idea for you. I'm pretty sure I did that life hack a while ago. Oh, did you? I think so. Did you?

Turns out we don't listen when you do that segment. Shocker. Okay. How much waste is produced by nuclear power? What per cubic foot? Like, I'll let you say like with a power plant, just one power plant, does it produce? One power plant produces enough nuclear waste per year

to fill a Volkswagen Beetle. Okay. That's not a lot. I was going to do a stadium and then I thought, they've been going forever. If it was a stadium each time would be full it's like my thing everything's measured in this the amazon stadium a day everything's measured in fucking stadiums and you said it's clean so the environmental impact of nuclear power is not as bad as we think i don't i believe it is clean energy yeah okay what are radioisotope thermoelectric generators

uh they're the what uh converts the uranium into nuclear power okay and then just last question you said chernobyl any other accidents you know any other chernobyl and then there was one the earthquake in in japan remember the name or uh no but i remember i did a whole bit on on like that was when around the time that bin laden was thrown in the water and then the thing and i was like that's how you make super villains that's an origin story nuclear waste you wait we've got a fucking godzilla bin laden coming our way are there any famous ones from the U.S.? The small town on the border, Del Taco, also had one. The Del Taco one? No, it's not the restaurant, the town.

Oh, I didn't know that one. Okay, Kevin, how did Jim do on his knowledge of nuclear power? Zero through ten, ten's the best. Very good. Well, those are pretty funny. Ten on comedy? Yeah. Okay. very good well those are pretty funny a lot of points for comedy yeah okay um yeah those are funnier answers than the the moon landing one so that was yeah moving on up um some were great i was i was really impressed some in the beginning and a few towards the end um but some were not so great. Yeah. So I'd say like a six. Six. Wow, that's a really good

score. I crashed poker the other day and got a two. He got bonus points for saying it was clean. Yeah. Yeah. Clean. I think he liked that you said it was clean. How about confidence? I'm going to give him a three

on confidence but agreed. Did like the answer. It's very funny. That's a nine. Well, it's look. Yeah. I don't expect you to. It's one of these things that you only know once you know.

Right. You know what I mean? There's no reason you should know a lot about this. There's no Jeopardy questions here. None of this is going to help you in your act. Well, maybe. We'll find out. You can do a chunk.

Do a chunk. Yeah. Okay. You got nine total. I'm going to give you 20. So you do a chunk yeah okay you got nine total i'm gonna give you 20 sir he-man i have the power i just want to say that i used to love he-man fuck i loved he-man and then it's like like jason whitehead's like i didn't like him as much and i was like they came out when i was like seven and when he was 11 of course you didn't like it much you you would have been a simpleton playing with He-Man at 11.

Is he four years older than you? I think so, yeah. My wife's a huge He-Man fan and it's like a lot to live up to. How old is your wife? She's a couple of years younger than me. How old are you? I'm 46. 46.

I know, that's right because I'm 45. That's the right age for He-Man. That's right and bang smack in the middle. Yeah, but women generally weren't He-Man fans. That's why they brought out She-Ra, man. Jem was around at the time. But she was. No, She-Ra.

She-Ra came in to help out. Maybe she was just a horny kid. Wouldn't you ever. They had that one He-Man that smelled really bad. They had to shut the factory down because everyone was getting toxic fucking. Oh, it wasn't like a BO in the cartoon it was the actual toy the toy was like a skunk like every every he-man had a different ability it started off with just he-man was a regular doll the man at arms uh his arm just went swing down like this to make it fun and then you had ones that could squirt water

had ones with suction cups on them whatever they could do with a doll to do something different. And then one of them just stank. That is a superpower. The stinky one in the factory they were making it and there was too many employees just coming home with headaches and shit. That's crazy. All right, so what is nuclear power?

Jim said it's formed by protons and neurons. Protons and neurons. And uranium dug up from the ground. So I think he meant neutrons. Neutrons, that's the one. Neutrons are very important to nuclear power. They're sort of like the catalyst that makes it happen. Protons are mostly there for the ride.

And he correctly said it's mostly made to to make electricity although you can do other things with it but that's its main point is you you generate heat and then you boil water and you run a turbine and the turbine turns a generator and you get electricity and your power see i don't think a lot of people know that so i think so you you you make the heat to boil water to make steam and that spins the turbine, which makes the electricity. Why can't we just do that with a Bunsen burner? You can, and there's lots of, that's a natural gas turbine. Oh, yeah, that's right.

That's actually kind of the big competitor with nuclear power. You need a fuel. That's how it does it. How do you feel about his idea for the new name, Clean-O-Boom-Boom Power? I love it. I definitely think it needs rebranding. Bring that back to your people i know a clean no boom boom power yeah no boom boom so no blowing up i don't know i like i like clino because okay so so when you have like

a nuclear uh submarine so i understand so how that happening? So they're heating the thing to make the submarine. Is that how the submarine gets its energy? Yeah, exact same way. They have a turbine on board. And so they're heating up the nuclear. And so people are very adverse to them because they're worried they might crash. Oh, it's the same way. It's heating up and spinning a turbine. Yeah, it's heating a turbine.

The reason you don't need steam coming out is because they're in the ocean. So it just dumps the heat back into the ocean. It's pretty easy. Yeah, because when you see that at nuclear power plants, what you see being emitted is steam, right? That's right. Yeah, that's all steam. So that's not toxic because that always looks like, oh, God.

There's absolutely nothing toxic coming out of it. All right. It's like a vape. It's not even connected to the reactor. Nothing coming out of the steam coming out the out of the uh the steam coming out none of it is in direct contact with any uranium or anything like that yeah and was i right about what i said about australia that they have tons of uranium and there's been a big pushback because i've heard this argument on different talk show or different radio shows and stuff like that

and uh it's always one that i've said that we could do it in australia we have the the ability to do it but they won't do it because of the name or is that just i don't think it's always one that I've said that we could do it in Australia. We have the ability to do it, but they won't do it because of the name, or is that just a – I don't think it's because of the name. I think there's another – I don't want to get conspiratorial, but Australia is a major coal exporter, and you've got a lot of uranium, and you have a lot of coal, and a lot of people buy coal, and I think that's – Well, not just exporter.

We use it in Australia. We have coal mines near the Great Barrier Reef. You won't make as much money from the iranian as they're bringing boats over people are very pro-coal not everybody i know we're gonna be we're not pro-coal in australia fucking but but no there's a lot of people who are pro-coal over there and then and then i think they use scare tactics when i say they're afraid of the word they use scare tactics for the nuclear power. Yeah, absolutely. So wait, so how does it work? So that's the next one.

How does it work then? So you use uranium, but like how does it, I don't, I mean. Well, just quickly before that. So if coal, if we have a finite amount of coal and mining coal is a bad thing for the world, why is it better to mine uranium? Like is uranium, do we have a finite amount of uranium and that's also a problem? There is a finite amount of uranium,

but the big difference is the ratio of the density. So I'll show you this a little later, but I'll give you a hint now. You can say it now if it makes sense. Well, the energy in uranium is about a million times denser than the energy in uranium is about a million times denser than the energy in coal. So for about a million tons of coal, you could with the same with one ton of uranium, you could get the same. A million to one. Yeah.

That doesn't just make it better from a mining point of view. That makes it better from everything. The plant doesn't have to be as big. The overhead into the environment doesn't have to be as big. You're not building these giant pits where you're you're pulling coal out and even even more interesting is there's actually about one part per million of uranium in coal so when you burn coal you actually release natural uranium into the air more uranium that is ever released from a nuclear power plant so coal actually causes the release of more radioactive material than a nuclear power plant.

So that would mean there is less money in mining uranium? Or there's just as much money and you would have less employees? There's definitely very little money in mining uranium. So another thing is even though we did mine it originally, very little uranium needs to be mined nowadays. In fact, most of it has already been mined a lot of it was mined during the uh during the cold war for the weapons program of various countries or just because people thought it they i think they thought it was more of the future that it turned out to be at the time so there's most countries have really large stockpiles of your so we have plenty of it just

sitting around we have tons of it already mined uh and also oh this is doing my head in already so we're still digging up the ground for fucking coal we have this shit just sitting in our garage yeah and even more exciting is uh uranium unlike coal uh is even dissolved in the ocean and so there's scientists who even figured out how to extract uranium just from pulling it out of sea wire yeah we don't do that yet because we don't need to but you know there's we have enough there's thousands if not millions i might sound very stupid like actually i know what coal looks like saying coal what does uranium look like i was just looking that up it looks like metal it's kind of boring looks like a metal well what are the questions i was like wondering what form can i jump Yeah. So one of the questions was what's yellow cake.

OK, so yellow cake is one of the forms of it's sort of halfway between when you get the uranium out and when you get uranium or it's halfway in between. It's uranium oxide and it looks bright yellow. That's why it's called yellow cake because it's yellow. It's yellow and fluffy and it looks delicious. But I don't think you should eat it. Yeah. Sounds like something you buy as a drug. You got that yellow cake. Sounds like something you buy as a drug, too. You got that yellow cake?

You'll be like, yeah, bro. Sounds like a derogatory slur to me. But everything does. So if you go from one country where it's mined and then you want to export it to a nuclear power country or something like that, usually it's transferred in the form of yellow cake. Sounds like something a cowboy would say to a bloke

who doesn't want to fight him. Like, what are you yellow cake it's like an effeminate guy he's a coward um i know that people listening to this podcast and some people people will get upset about even talking about nuclear power because they'll say oh well i mean if you want to talk about being cleaner than coal and safer than coal, obviously, but then people will talk about renewable energy like solar, wind, things like that. And obviously those have their drawbacks too.

Yeah, but you've got to have things in conjunction with. So we're not going to one day just turn off the coal switch and then go electric. It'll be a gradual thing. So while we're doing this gradual thing, why don't we fix to the cleaner, less mining holes in the ground option yeah and this was pretty important to me because is it cheaper is it cheaper for us as the public it is cheaper yes and people will argue about that too but uh it absolutely is cheaper and you can see that from it being done

on the ground electricity is much cheaper in france than it is in italy for example italy's nuclear is banned france they have almost all nuclear power plants there oh france is like big into it yeah france is into it japan is into it that was that thing where homer simpson does his prayer before food and he goes i like to bless nuclear power which is the best source of energy not like that pipe dream solar so this was pretty big to me because i actually used to work in the solar industry uh before i went back to grad school and while i was really excited about it um there's a lot of things that are very frustrating like it consumes a lot of land and a lot of side resources and the panels do not have not really gotten much cheaper they've they've got they look like they've gotten cheaper but they kind of reached a flat line and you still have to wire them up and you have to uh it just it

takes up a lot of resources on the side solar too and it's just like the the amount of roof space that people have it's like so many people have such high electricity bills but can't get systems that are big enough to cover that and it's like like, at that point, is it worth it? Like, yeah. And imagine you live in New York or something. Yeah. Your roof space is shared by like 10,000 other people in your apartment. Yeah. But like Jim was saying, too, there's a whole balance there, too. If you live in the desert or in L.A. or something like you got roof space, then you can do it.

Then you should do it. And then then you have this balance... That's another reason why Australia is probably one of the most anti-nuclear of the developed countries, the advanced countries. There's a lot of solar there. Yeah, there's tons of solar there. And then when you fly in,

you see solar everywhere. I've got hydro at my house. Electricity. You got a dam? No, just there's a duck on a chain swimming around my pool. And he goes around and around and he works a turbine underneath. That powers a change swimming around my pool. And he goes around and around. And he works a turbine underneath.

And that powers a small light in my house. Arnie, stop bothering him. All right. What is nuclear fission? Okay, this one you got wrong. I think you passed on that one. I said moving on. So fission is the main thing that works in a in a current nuclear power plant um

what powers the sun is called fusion so those are the two types of nuclear power there's fusion and fission to date we have not gotten a power plant to work with fusion there's a lot of people trying we've been trying for a long time i hope that happens what does that mean though okay you get to that so fission is when you take a large atom and you split it in half and you release neutrons and energy and you get a chain reaction and it keeps going because those neutrons then cause that to happen to another atom. And so you can cause it to happen over and over. Fusion is a little different. It takes a lot of heat and pressure to get fusion to work because atoms don't like running into each other because they're charged. So they try to repel each other.

But if you get enough heat and pressure, then they eventually do stick together. They make a heavier atom. This is what powers the sun. The problem is the sun is giant and we don't have that much gravity on Earth. So we're trying to do it with magnetic fields or lasers or even sometimes physical pressure waves. There's a lot of different techniques that people are trying. None of them work at the moment. The holidays aren't sleigh bells and mistletoe.

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Moment. I mean, they don't work for more than a few seconds at most. Is it more efficient than, say, if we just got a whole lot of orphans to ride bikes in a warehouse? They're probably about the same. I was walking through the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco one time, and there was like a concert that they were playing, and it was being powered by people on

bikes they had they had all these stationary bikes i've seen that oh they did a grateful dead show these people died it was like all these stationary bikes and people were like and they had the and then uh as we were walking by it um some guy was like i'm tired hey you have the bike and someone else get on it it was like people like nobody was like, I'm tired. I need to get off the bike. Can someone else get on it? And it was like nobody was like tapping out. Like with the guy, I was like, this isn't a great plan. Like the PA system is about to shut off. So we've got these disasters, and Forrest is about to bring them up, right? You know, Chernobyls and whatnot.

We can jump to them. Yeah, Chernobyls and whatnot. Okay, so you understand why people are worried because these things have happened how how do you stop these things from happening yeah so they should jump all around it's definitely not something to ignore and uh nuclear physicists like me we don't ignore it we don't pretend it didn't happen um but there's a lot of caveats that are pretty important. Arnie. So chill. There's a lot of caveats.

Sorry. I like you better when a dog was licking your balls. You seemed a lot more relaxed. You shouldn't have put the peanut butter on. I mean, he's not being tense. I don't want you to bother him. Also, sometimes they've been exaggerated quite a lot. So like Three Mile Island,

a lot of people thought it was this enormous disaster. Well, there was only three miles. That's the one. That's the one in the US. Yeah, that's the one in the US. It caused a lot of people to be really scared of it. There was a meltdown. Meltdowns are bad, but virtually no radioactivity was released because it was all inside a containment vessel.

And yet a lot of people think that it was spewing stuff all over. That didn't happen. That did happen in Chernobyl. But again, there's a caveat. You mentioned that as an old reactor. It absolutely is. We're going to talk about advanced nuclear later. But Chernobyl is what's called a Gen 1 reactor. That means the very first type of reactor we ever built. They didn't have containment vessels. Its purpose wasn't even really to make power originally. It was more related to the Soviet Union weapons program. And it had a lot of organizational and safety issues behind the scenes. And they're fighting over that land right now. Why? Let it be.

Oh, in the Ukraine. It's not just in the Ukraine, right? It's just over the border? Or is it in Russia? It's part of where they're fighting in that area. It's on the border, right? Yeah, Ukraine is near the border, but some of the exclusion zone is in Belarus, and some of it's in...

Yeah. And so Three Mile Island, none of it got out. Because I remember that was when... I'm trying to see. In 1979, I was little. None of it got out. No one died. No one was hurt.

And yet it created just incredible... Forrest lived right there. He was two at the time. He was about four at the time. Pennsylvania. Yeah. Used to be a very thin girl. I remember when it happened in my head.

I was just like, Oh my God. Like, yeah. Just like freaking out about it. Cause that's what they meant. And again, the same with Fukushima.

No one died from the accident. There were a few people who died from the evacuation, but that also happened in other areas that were evacuated. But there were animals that died, right? In the ocean and stuff like that, I think. Not that I know of. Also, you've got to make the plants less unsightly. You've got to work on that. Paint them. Put a mural

on the side of the big cylinders. Spruce it up a bit. Write the word love or something. Angel wings on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah make it instagrammable paint it like a volcano put paper mache around the outside bit of fun but even uh fukushima was a gen 2 reactor it was a one built designed right after the type that was in chernobyl um we're now entering gen 4 reactor reactors that's all the reactors we want to

build now on so you're saying they're like iphones like they you know they're just designed to break down after a few years yeah this one takes great pictures it's kind of like saying but this nokia sucks why would i want an iphone you know it's just like okay but it's a flip phone from uh you know 94 you know so well how often should these things be replaced because you think once you build one of these big things it probably costs a billion dollars to build a plan or whatever yeah uh but in addition to uh the design also a lot of them get upgraded when we learn about what's what needs to be fixed you know like from an accident but also just as people learn more and more about making it safer and safer, they can do things where they upgrade an old plant. And that matters a lot because like,

for example, in Three Mile Island, the accident was completely avoidable. And unfortunately, it was just bad management that caused that even that accident to happen. But we'll always have human error. That's true. So that's important. So a lot of the design is to make sure that human error is less involved, less capable of causing a problem. So, for example, in when we were going to talk about advanced nuclear, advanced nuclear, a really exciting thing that they're doing now with reactors is they're trying to make sure that even if everyone has to leave, let's say there's you know, there's a there's a disaster or something and humans can't be there. They want the plant itself to be safe. So that's called walk away safe. And a lot of the new types of reactors are that way.

And that hasn't happened with all the previous generations. They've always had some backup generator or they need someone to go close a valve or something like that. And even though you can you can take that into account and you can say, let's make sure we have a backup generator that we don't even want that to be a thing that can go wrong. We want the reactor design itself to sit there and even if the you know the worst thing happens and no one's there to run it or maybe you know like hijackers take over the plant or something you want it so that it still uh is basically can't have a problem all right oh hijackers didn't even think about

hijackers so okay i got a two-part question right so how do meltdowns happen second of all does every plant have a red light that goes is that the sound uh yes every plant has that who's in charge of replacing those bulbs well there's a little speaker too yeah yeah you gotta get that make sure you definitely have to have alarms those are important um so a meltdown happens when um so fission is a chain reaction as i mentioned before meaning like it's it's like it's a lot like a fire that's burning so except in the case instead of like heat from the fire it's neutrons that then give off heat so what what happens with the meltdown is um this chain reaction gets out of control, meaning the number of neutrons being made

is way too fast. There are too many of them being made quickly and they kind of grow exponentially. And to get a nice reaction, you have to have it stable. Now they can't blow up the way a bomb does. That's also a common misconception. Plants can melt down,

but they can't blow up. They can't just magically turn into a fission bomb. They simply don't have enough enriched uranium in them to do that. And that's not an accident. That's completely on purpose. People don't want a reactor to be just a bomb waiting to happen. I mean, I have a meltdown like once a week. I feel like they're getting a bad reputation.

1979 was the last meltdown. Three Mile Island. I always hear they're getting a bad reputation. 1979 was the last meltdown? Three Mile Island? I always hear about a crack in the reactor. Is that something that movies? Well, that would be bad, but yeah. It seems like a lot of problem areas. Well, there's tons, but there's also things designed to prevent it.

So, for example, I mentioned the containment vessel on the outside. That's to prevent things like a crack. If there's a crack, the worst case scenario, you want it to only fill the containment vessel. So you have like a little metal thing around it? Yeah, there's a metal steel vessel. What if that one cracks after that one cracks? It would be very unfortunate.

And so you rush and dole it out. So you keep on going, containment vessel, containment vessel, containment vessel. And then by the time you get into the nuclear power plant, it's like the opening scene from Get Smart. This is some deep cuts for some young people

who are watching this. No, I got it. I love Get Smart. It's good. I love it too. Bring that back. Not the movie. So I mentioned the density

of coal and gasoline compared to nuclear. So this is- A cocaine vial. Yeah. I've had these. That's why it was so cheap on amazon i've got these kicking around my house so what's this so inside of there uh you can pass it up am

i all right uh i it'll probably spill so try not it's got some in it yeah look inside wait what's in there what yeah it's empty those no there's little pebbles at the bottom little pellets oh yeah that is how much how much enriched uranium you need. You could drive. That is the same energy enough for you to drive a car across the country. What? And it costs $1. Really?

Yeah. And that's safe in that vial? Well, it's not actually uranium. Sorry. It's the size of uranium. I had a few fucking pepper kernels, and i was holding it like i had something didn't actually bring uranium that's why i was like wait you just talked about all these different chambers and vessels like there we go i was gonna snort it for a bit there'd be a guy with a machine

gun here yeah it was actually um that's mind-blowing so what can i just dig up uranium in my backyard then and you're saying a guy with a machine gun would shoot me for having actually you can uranium ore is really easy that's another thing i could have brought over i have a piece of uranium ore that is you are allowed to get you can order you can buy it on amazon you can buy it on amazon that's right remember we did that thing where you can buy it yeah and it's on the patreon of course yeah it's cool it's got it's got like a little green flex and stuff like that um that that's actually uh that's dense uranium ore but there's uranium in your backyard so it's not dangerous to the touch or anything like that uh it's mildly dangerous uh but but

that's but that's not what's kind of like when you see those signs and i'm really trying to sell this stuff well okay but hear me out It's dangerous because your backyard is slightly dangerous in that there's radiation everywhere. It's no more dangerous than walking in your backyard, and you're already doing that, I think. This is LA. Who was the first person to dig up a rock of uranium and just go, I reckon this could do something?

I'm supposed to know. This is one of these things I'm supposed to know. A famous scientist, he put uranium on a piece of film, and that's how they discovered radioactivity, actually. What movie was it? Martin Heinrich Klaproth, right? That sounds right. I might have been right with Austria, man.

He was a German chemist. I might have been right with Austria. He just discovered that something was flying out of the uranium ore. He didn't know what, and it turns out that was radioactive particles. Way weaker than in a plant, though. So just uranium ore is very weakly radioactive. And this guy just got an x-ray. It's Wilhelm Rotgen.

I don't know. Rotagen, yeah. So, I mean, just so you know, even bananas are radioactive. When you eat a banana, there's radioactive potassium. He hates bananas. Don't give him another reason to hate bananas. I knew they were troublesome. They're probably shit stirrers, bananas. Don't give him another reason to hate bananas. I knew they were troublesome. They're fucking shit stirrers, bananas.

The thing about bananas, most arrogant fruit you've ever fucking. Arrogant? Arrogant. Explain. The fruit's not arrogant. No, the people who eat them are fucking up themselves. I love bananas. When someone cracks open a banana just in public with you,

very rare you see someone pull an apple out on a plane and just like that, right? Very rare. The banana, oh, gets a free pass. And it leaves this fucking peel and they hold it and then they just, any other rapper you wouldn't just dump on your tray in front of you. Put it in the front seat or something away from vision,

but they proudly go, I'm a fruit eater. And they fucking, like, it's just anyone who eats a banana in public is a dead set cunt they are. It's like from the peel, from the peel. If you eat like a banoffee pie, I'm all for that. Have your fun, right? You slice up a bit in your cereal. But if you hold that fucking peel

on public transport who the fuck do you think you are i've seen a person in real life slip on a banana peel and i did not think that that was a real thing it would be slippery i could not believe it my friend colleen and i were in the car we were coming out of a parking garage i see the banana peel this guy's carrying multiple shopping bags and i was like and i was joking around i was like oh you better not slip on the banana fucking slipped and i was like i was so glad she was there because i was like nobody would ever believe this but full-on legs out from it was legs out from underneath him flying in the air they didn't put that into slapstick films out of nowhere i truly thought that that was just a made-up thing.

Some cunts or another cunt slip on a fucking banana film. That's comedy. That's going to be all my films. It was hilarious. I will say that. Did it make the noise? I made the noise. What is a control rod?

Is it the glowy stick at the beginning of The Simpsons? No. It fucking is, man. What's the glowy stick at the beginning of The Simpsons? No. It fucking is, man. What's the glowy stick at the beginning of The Simpsons? The Simpsons. Trying to scare you. When they do the thing, there's the conveyor belt, and you've got your gloves, and you go in,

you're picking up things. Is that a real thing? That's a real thing, yeah. Those boxes exist. You don't usually use them at a plant, but, I mean, you can. Yeah, they exist in a lab. Yeah. All right, so what is a glowy stick? It's getting more and more replaced by robots, uh you don't usually use them at a plant but i mean you can yeah they exist in a lab yeah all right so what is it mostly it's getting more and more replaced by robots so you more it's like

yeah remote control but what if the robots turn on us and they crack the reactor well that's where again the walk away safe would help because we wanted yeah the fucking robot doing it you have another robot doing it and then your last bloke is the robot i've got i've got this thing in my house like this control force it runs the music in my house it breaks down is the robot. I've got this thing in my house, like this control force, it runs the music in my house. It breaks down all the time. And I have no one to call. There's one bloke and he comes out about once a month

and fixes it for me and says, oh, just. So the robots break, the robots break. You need one person at the end of the line. What if that cunts are dead shit? Then you're screwed. You need two of them. We haven't done the rods what is a control rod remember I said that the reaction

has to be kind of carefully balanced a control rod is the thing that helps balance that in the old days they used to sort of stick the rods up to try and control it the downside about that is if you lose control of that they fall out and the reaction goes up now they're much better about it they have the control rods from the top and a control rod is something that just uh it absorbs

neutrons it just it just sucks up that's what i was gonna ask you so that's how they control it yeah so it doesn't melt down and it's like those fly tapes that people hang from their roof exactly by the time you get those fly tapes they're a real american thing you stick that sticky tape down yeah i don't even fucking just put up with the flies. Oh, you've never seen this? Yeah, it's the tape hanging from your ceiling and the flies go. It's a bit of fucking sticky tape that comes from a roll. Watch some hoarders.

There's always cunts that have put them up. And then this tape that's hanging from your ceiling just gets covered in flies. What? Oh, it's the ugliest thing you can put up in your house. You might as well just have flies. I've never seen this before in my life. You've never seen this? I've never even heard of it.

Do we know what a control rod's made of? That's crazy. They're made of all sorts of metals, but boron is a good example. I'll give a simple example. Sometimes they're made of- My rod. Okay. Boron is a great one because-

Oh my God. Boron is called a neutron poison. That's boron. Actually, there's some great history here, which is that one of the things that the Germans got wrong is that when they were trying to make a reactor during World War II, one of the things they didn't realize is they had to take boron out of the moderator, the graphite that was around the reactor. And because they didn't take it out, the reactor didn't work.

And so they thought that nuclear power wouldn't work. Boron sounds like a supervillain who just tells you stories about people you haven't met. My neighbor's son's girlfriend. We talked about yellow cake and uranium comes from the ground jim got a point for that yeah yeah it also comes to the ocean but yeah and the ocean yeah but not wrong yeah from the ground man how do you find it do you find it with it with a diggity machine no you find it the old boring way uh you see little green streaks and rocks usually is how you do it oh so i what so

does it ever happen that like say, say, you're diamond mining, and then you go, we've just found a shitload of uranium. That's probably happened, yeah. I don't know enough about geology, but probably. One nice thing about uranium ore is that it glows green, and this might be why they did this in The Simpsons, but it doesn't glow green because it's radioactive. It glows green because it's fluorescent.

So it's no different than any other fluorescent material. In in fact they used to make dishes and cups out of this stuff for decoration because people liked the the glowy green thing they're like oh i shine light on it but but then people realize like maybe we shouldn't be making dishware out of but also glow sticks man i always look at them used to give them to kids i feel like that's filled with shit right i don't think it's uranium something else you have to crack it and then it goes what so enriched uranium is um is needed that's what you need for nuclear yeah that's right so uranium just the way it is by itself is will not produce a nuclear reaction it won't make a bomb it won't make a power plant you have to make a power plant. You have to enrich it. Now, the amount you have to enrich to make a bomb is much higher than the amount you have to make a reactor.

So for a reactor, you just need a few percent more. So there's two isotopes in nature. So they have a different number of neutrons, but they're chemically the same. So they're both uranium. But uranium 235 is what you want for a reactor. Most uranium is 238. Oh, I've always used 238. That's your problem. 235 is what you want for a reactor. Most uranium is 238. Oh, I've always used 238. That's your problem.

235. So a big part of the effort, the Manhattan Project to make the first nuclear weapons was to do this enrichment, to get enough of it to actually make the part that can engage in fission very quickly. So when you said we could power a car that goes across the country,

have we got cars? Well, you wouldn't power it that way directly. For example, you can have an electric car. It would power a Tesla if you charged it. Right, but would I have to go to the uranium station to fill it up or could I have like a little thing burning in my car? No, you would just – they used to want to do that back in the 50s, but they gave up on that idea. You just have a nuclear power plant

to make the electricity to charge your car, but that's all that you would need to do that. Yes. You want a nuclear car. I've been saying this to you. I have an invention. I'm the ideas man. I need other people to come up with the science. This might be where you come in. My invention is the battery that doesn't run out.

Okay? The battery that doesn't run out okay all right the battery yeah the battery that doesn't run out you do that man we're gonna make a few shekels man i tell you the battery that doesn't run out it's a winner of an idea that's a great idea there was one of the questions about that you didn't answer it right but you that was what was the question it was what's a nuclear oh yeah a radio, yeah, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Yes. They've already invented the battery that doesn't run out. Yes, that is a battery that doesn't run out.

Can we put them in phones? We can't, but they are on Mars rovers, and they're on space satellites. So, for example, the Mars rover right now, it is powered by a nuclear. There's no new ideas in this world. What's another world, actually, to be fair? There's other people working on more exciting ones there's smaller ones that use carbon uh they actually we talked about wait so that's a battery that doesn't run out a radioisotope thermoelectric it runs out but it runs out after like 200 years

oh no no my one lasts forever okay well there's 200 years there's another type they're working about a small radioactive diamond battery where the radioactivity is inside of a diamond, making it very hard to release the stuff. But diamonds are so rare. I know. The funny part is these would probably be cheaper than actual diamonds because they'd be like, oh, that's just a battery.

They're a battery. I think they're very close to making synthetic diamonds that are exactly the same. Not like a cubic zirconium, like exactly the same chemical makeup. They're very close to making them in labs. Don't those people just mysteriously disappear? That's what I thought made diamonds expensive.

Somebody's like, well, I could just do this in my kitchen, and then they're suddenly gone the next day. Yeah, my wife wouldn't have a blood diamond. Fucking high maintenance. Thank God for Canada. I tell you, yeah, so I got the diamond from Canada. Yeah, they just found the diamonds. They just found diamonds in the 90s for the first time,

in the 90s in Canada. That means that the person who first found a diamond in Canada could have been listening to Nirvana or just going, I better get home and see what happens with Russ and Rachel. You know what I mean? Like craziness. So waste. What happens with the waste generated from a nuclear power plant and and you know we talked about uh jim says you put them in barrels um and then and then it's hard to get rid of that he said from one

plant it would be for a year would be size of a volkswagen beetle let's talk about that those that actually that was part of why i gave them a little bit higher score that's pretty close to the right answer so they're not barrels although i mean they're basically barrels but they're not like those metal barrels you say they're they're a more special type of barrel called a dry cask and they work really well and you can literally hit one with a train and they will not break they can also fall off a truck and they won't break why don't they make the train out of that material? I don't know. But then if you hit it with a train, it'd be bad. We're trying to protect the barrels, not the train.

I don't know, but I'm just saying we make everything out of that. Or we make the whole world out of Nerf material. Yeah, so you also got the amount roughly right. It would fit into a car. In fact, right now, the part you did go wrong, though, is we do not bury it underground. That was the original plan. A lot of people didn't like that. There's a lot of people who said, not in my backyard, not in my mountain, whatever.

And so people, for a while, they were worried because they're like, I thought we wanted to bury this. The reality is that one thing is it doesn't last as long as you hear it. I mean, you hear like it lasts for tens of thousands of years. And while some isotopes do last for that long, the vast majority of it goes away in a few hundred years. So stop your moaning. Yes, stop your moaning. And in fact, there's so little of it

that you don't actually have to put it anywhere. And nowadays people just store it in the parking lot of the power plant that's running. And there's so little of it generated that it never takes up space at the power plant. So they'll store it there and then they'll- Yeah, they just have a big warehouse. And also, it's really clear someday we'll be able to recycle it. I mean, we know how to do it now.

It's just not cost effective. Reuse the uranium? You use the- there's still some uranium inside. There's other isotopes that are being used in the medical industry. There's all kinds of useful stuff in there. It's not actually waste. We call it waste, but it's not waste. It's actually very valuable.

What makes it frustrating is that it's mixed together, and we don't have a cheap way of unmixing it at the moment. So I'm glad we're not burying it because, you know, in anywhere from 10 to 30 years, 40 years, we were going to be regularly recycling that because it was always the waste that everyone they thought was being poured into rivers and shit like that yeah and so the fact that it's just a warehouse and how smart am i volkswagen beetle yeah and then the first one more factor i want to give you about this uh

all the radioactive material from power plants uh generated in the last 20 years it fit into the end zone of a football field from the entire world and just to give you just bury it in the end zone yeah and to give you a contrast of how little space that is we lose that much land from global warming and sea level rise roughly every hour so every hour that's how much the u.s loses in coastline just from i can see people in their cars your minds are blown right now your minds are blown that wasn't even a dinner party yeah you're starting to think about fucking nuclear power in a different way and then who was the first to develop nuclear power and what was it used for well a lot of turkish and delorean's right no a lot of power and what was it used for well a lot of turkish and deloreans right no a lot of people uh worked on it so um john wheeler was the guy

who first published the paper about fission chain reaction uh he he's kind of cool and then he's friends with kip thorne who was the producer of interstellar just won the nobel prize yeah so but he did this a long time ago yeah i love that movie you should have them on the show oh no no i was thinking the movie inner space with uh martin short that's a good one the one with martin short where he inner space yeah yeah where dennis quaid's inside his body in a little tiny ship that's a good movie man that's That's where he met Meg Ryan. But the first person to build a first reactor was Enrico Fermi, who fled Italy right before World War II and came to the U.S.

What was that? Did I say Italy? You said Turkey. You said DeLoreans. And he wouldn't have been able to do that without the help of the Turks. Actually, you did say the Turkish. People think it's Italy, but the Turkish never get credit. Yeah.

Yeah, but it was in America, though, right? The first power plant and the first reactor. You guys did everything. The first power plant was, I believe, 1955, and it was called the Fermi One, named after the fact that Fermi made the first reactor. And where was that in America? Where was that?

It was, well, I have a party fact about that. Okay, we'll do that later. Okay, and then how many nuclear power plants are there in the world? Just give us a 200. Last I checked, which was last year, is 440, I think. 440, and how much of the world's power supply is that, 15%? It's about, yeah, 10 and 15%. All right.

You got that, Jim, there. Advanced nuclear. What is that? Ah, my favorite. Okay. Advanced nuclear is generation four. So I talked about the Gen 1 reactors. 4 Gen.

Yeah. This is everything we learned from every previous accident and also a lot of stuff we wanted to do a long time ago. Some of the ideas are actually old. We didn't have the technology to do it cost effectively now we do computers help with that all sorts of stuff lots of years of research one of the most exciting things about advanced nuclear is that um first of all most all the fuel is used from recycled uh downgraded warheads so that's one thing that's really exciting. No, not the candy.

No, actually. The old missiles? Yeah. Actually, like Cold War era enriched uranium, but then we de-enrich it back down. That's how much uranium there is in the world. We actually have extra that we need to. So those missiles, those Cold War missiles, they're not even usable. No, they took the material out.

Some of it's from Russia that they gave us at the end of the Cold War, believe it or not. Some of it's from Mars. A lot of it, peace agreements, stuff like that. And it's just been, like you said, sitting in a warehouse. Yeah. So we're not even needing to mine most of this. Also, the really exciting part, though, is that certain types of advanced reactors cannot melt down. It's not just that they're walkaway safe. They literally, the fuel has been redesigned.

There's a new kind of fuel called triso fuel, which cannot melt down, meaning that it can go up to all the way to 2000 degrees and it will not break open. And it has little case around each pellet of uranium that prevents the release of any fissionable material. So even not only can they not melt down, also are would have a very hard time releasing anything even outside of that containment vessel they wouldn't even release it into the room of the containment vessel so and

this is now or this is the future this is being made right now yeah and this has been this is like 20 years of work lots of government investment lots of scientists spending a lot of time on it could they make airplanes power power airplanes with this too they can but not directly but you can use i'm glad you asked because one of the things you can do is you can use advanced nuclear to do things more sophisticated than just making electricity including making things like jet fuel yeah because i look and i i don't think like I know that nuclear is I believe it's cleaner, obviously, than coal, oil, things like that. I don't think anything's perfect as far as power. I mean, there's so many humans on the planet.

I mean, even solar and wind and stuff like that has drawbacks and stuff like that. But I think that we can tend to go towards things that are cleaner and safer. But I always look at planes and I'm like, what are we going to do about planes? Because we're all flying planes whenever and you still need this the jet fuel that we use now that that causes just as much as car yeah and it's so much and i love flying so i don't want to give that up i'm i'm worried somebody's just like planes are banned but i want to go to fiji wait so there's a type of fuel that could be made possibly yes yes imagine if they said no one's ever allowed to fly ever again and it'll be starting next week how many people would move oh my god how many people would move go this is

my last chance to get out of wherever the fuck you can take a boat yeah my parents went to london in the 60s i wanted to take like three weeks or three weeks on a boat without a stop the the oriana boat right which is a P&O boat. And they left from Sydney and then they landed in fucking, I believe, Portsmouth after three weeks. And my mum reckons she got off the boat and it was wet and it was fucking Portsmouth. Hello, the people of Portsmouth. But it's a rough town, right?

And she went, why the fuck did I get on this boat? She gets right back on the boat. Because you've still got a two-hour drive to an hour and a half drive to london from there so it seemed very daunting when they got there but like how shit the australian cricket team used to play england in cricket matches and they used to like in the in the 50s and stuff used to have like and now boys are off to play those palms in England. Good luck, boys. Here they are on the boat. And, you know, all that type of stuff. It's like, fuck, man.

These weren't like cruise liners with buffets. You were sleeping in bunk beds. I know. We're bitching about, like, you've got to fly four hours. Oh, I would not be gigging in Asia this December. You wouldn't be gigging. If we were just on boat technology. You wouldn't be gigging in Columbus, Ohio.

No. Asia. I know you. No. Asia. I know you. I'd see you in Bakersfield, and that's it. That's it. I'd be like, I'm doing a world tour. See you soon, San Diego. Yeah.

So advanced nuclear, it feels like they need a marketing plan. Yeah, the government's not so great at that. There's companies working on it, though. Is the bomb part of the problem, the nuclear bombs? How does a nuclear bomb work? It definitely used to because for two reasons. One, people associated them in their head. They were trying to avoid nuclear war.

We say we have nukes. Like, it's just we've even. Yeah. So, for example, like I said, Italy doesn't have nuclear power plants. Part of that is because they amended their constitution constitution said we're going to be a nuclear free country but they banned both you know they could have picked one they could have said we're not going to have nuclear weapons but said they picked both but one of the other nice things about advanced nuclear is that it decreases one of the things that's always been a concern of early

nuclear power which is proliferation, meaning the reactor proliferation is because it proliferates warheads. That's where the term comes from. That one of the things that people want to avoid is that just because you're in control of a reactor, they don't want it to be then easy to, to make a bomb from that. So advanced reactors, advanced nuclear are, it's much, much harder for someone to sneak a bomb out of it. So things like the fuel is much harder to turn into what could be used for a weapon. It's not impossible, but it's much harder. And then even more importantly, people coming to inspect it, inspectors, world inspectors, can't be tricked. And that's happened before in the past.

and that's happened before in the past so it's older reactors people literally snuck weapons grade plutonium out of the reactor without inspectors even noticing so that's really important to make sure that we can't do that anymore so so this is probably this isn't your topic but it's insane so we've had two nuclear bombs dropped in the world right how many of them have we got just kicking around that we haven't used well there's the wikipedia answer and then there's the real answer and the wikipedia answers i think we have about 2 000 warheads ready to go in the u.s about 2 000 in russia but i will just uh invite you to to wonder if wikipedia actually has like access to to clearance and everything you're saying Wikipedia isn't a thousand percent accurate. That's fucking wild.

Wikipedia's... Jim's from Perth. His last name isn't even spelled right in part of his Wikipedia. It said he was from Perth for years and so when we were working on the Jim Jeffery show I wrote wrote to them and I said, I tried to fix it for you and then I wrote to them and said, he's from Sydney and they asked for like proof. And I said, well, I'm sitting next to him. There's a good line in The Office where Michael Scott's looking

at Wikipedia and he goes, Wikipedia, anyone in the world can put information on here. Anyone. So you know you're getting the best stuff. All right. Now it's time for dinner party facts. You've already given us at least a couple, but it's part of our show. Expert gives us something obscure, interesting.

It blows our audience's mind. You already gave us. I've already been mind blown about me too. It's like I've got nukes going on in my head. show expert gives us something obscure interesting it blows our audience mind you already i already mean mind blown about me it's like i got nukes going on in my head yeah yeah you got another one back to 2000 in america what's our plan with those don't you need just like five just to go we're gonna fucking bury that country five will do it well they're little though they used to be big now they're little same size tactical nukes

same size as that jar yeah so they wouldn't blow up a whole city with one yeah that's not the plan anymore at least not the plan that I know about yeah they're more for like taking out an army unit because they still test them they still test them you see those ones

like that's the whole thing we don't want to get rid of- Well, North Korea just tested them. They tested them in the outback of Australia. And it's like- Well, we're not supposed to test them. No, the French were testing some in Australia. Well, the US and Russia has not openly tested- Yeah, we're not testing them.

North Korea has been. Because of the comprehensive testing. I might be wrong and rioting and correct me, but I believe maybe 20 years ago, the French were testing them in the outback of Australia. Yeah, 20 years. Yeah, that's right. The French were testing them in the outback of Australia

and it was like the French Prime Minister, they were protesting everything. He goes, we have a saying in France, too much of something is nothing, right? Which is good. It's like when you get abused on the internet so much that it just becomes like, fuck that. One comment will kill kill you but 50 won't you know what i mean yeah and it's just like it's like uh because too much is uh nothing so it's sort of work people just stop

protesting about it yeah all right what do you got one more dinner party okay so i said i was gonna get back to this um yes Where the first nuclear reactor was made. This is pretty funny. It was actually made under the bleachers of a football stadium at Chicago University. In 1941. Go the three eyes. Oh, yeah. What was it again?

1941. Oh, it's not bad. 1940. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not bad. Did they tell the students? No, Oh, it's not bad. 1940. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not bad. Did they tell the students? No, they didn't tell the students. It's really warm in this section.

So did you need a plant to make the bomb that went on Hiroshima? That one was just to demonstrate that it was possible, but it was part of the Manhattan Project that Einstein had helped get funded. And this is kind of hilarious. One of the big things that Fermi needed was about $6,000 to buy the graphite moderator for that reactor. Why the first one needed $6,000 and that changed the course of history. I don't know,

but that's, oh, well, um, Kev, Dr. Kevin, Peter Hickerson.

Thank you for being here again on Twitter and Instagram. You can find them at KP Hickerson.erson uh and you can listen to his podcast surely you're joking uh that he hosts it's a science and comedy podcast that he created with jimmy o yang featuring nobel prize winner scientists and comedians thank you for being here again um jim yeah thank you for being in the podcast i appreciate that ladies and gentlemen if you're ever at a party

and someone comes up to you and goes nuclear power isn't safe go boom and then go I don't know about that and walk away

no boom boom yeah no boom boom good night Australia a show.