Neon Green Energy (E363)

Summary

QAA Podcast Episode 363: "Neon Green Energy"

Date: March 13, 2026
Hosts: Julian Feeld, Travis View, Jake Rockatansky, Brad Abrahams, Sean J. Patrick Carney (guest)

---

Episode Overview

This episode delves deep into the resurgence of nuclear energy in both cultural imagination and real-world policy, intertwining themes of secrecy, technology, geopolitics, and disinformation. Guest Sean J. Patrick Carney, of the "Time Zero" podcast, discusses the complex, dark, and often conspiratorial history and present of nuclear energy, critiquing the myths that nuclear is clean, safe, and the solution to climate change. The hosts and Sean illuminate how nuclear narratives are shaped by pop culture, defense interests, Silicon Valley, and a new wave of techno-solutionism, all while raising pressing questions about waste, safety, and the future.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Nuclear Revival: From Fringe to Mainstream

• Public Fascination: Nuclear energy is suddenly "everywhere"—from recent mass shootings to pop culture like the "Fallout" series ([06:28]).
• Secrecy & Conspiracy: Nuclear tech's secrecy breeds conspiracy theories; notable is the origin of "Q" in QAnon, based on DOE nuclear clearance ([06:34]).
  • "The Q in QAnon is nuclear in origin. So Q is a DOE designation for nuclear secrets." – Sean ([06:34])
• Recent Tragedies Connect to Nuclear: Examples include the Dallas ICE shooter with a nuclear fallout map and shootings targeting physicists, fueling real and imagined links between violence and the atomic.

2. Nuclear, UFOs, and Manufactured Myths

• Cold War Secrecy: Stories like 1967's Malmstrom AFB missile shutdown are recounted as both UFO lore and actual secret EMP weapons tests ([08:14]–[11:46]).
  • "If you point out defense incentives, you're covering up the real UFOs. If you debunk the alien and tech angle, you're doing PR for the deep state." – Sean ([10:15])
• Deliberate Distraction: The government historically seeded UFO stories to cloak nuclear development, creating confusion and conspiracy double-binds.
• Pop Culture Reflections: Discussion includes Lou Elizondo and stories of ETs being interested in our nuclear tech ([15:56]–[19:23]).

3. The Four Core Myths of Nuclear Energy

Myth 1: Nuclear Power is Green & Clean

• Uranium Extraction's Toll: Front-end devastation—uranium often mined on Indigenous land (Navajo Nation, Congo, Grand Canyon), causing vast and lasting health/environmental disasters ([20:59]–[26:06]).
  • "On the Navajo Nation alone, there are at least 500 abandoned uranium mines." – Sean ([21:56])
• Waste Crisis: U.S. nuclear plants have no permanent waste disposal solution; waste sits in pools or casks, hazardous for unimaginably long timescales ([25:01]).
  • "The half life of uranium is 4.5 billion years, which is the approximate age of planet Earth." ([24:05])

Myth 2: Nuclear is Always On

• Unreliability Rhetoric: Nuclear boosters claim 24/7 output, but every energy source (including nuclear) relies on complex infrastructure ([27:15]–[28:47]).
• Economic and Political Barriers: US lag in grid adaptation is due less to technology, more to corporate and political inertia; privatized systems reward shortcuts at expense of innovation ([28:47]).
• Energy "Duck Curve": Renewables can be reliable if grid is planned, but myths persist for the benefit of fossil interests ([28:51]–[30:33]).

Myth 3: Nuclear Power is Very Safe

• Disasters & Near Misses: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima are not worst-case scenarios; a modeled French worst-case would leave "half of northern France and parts of Germany uninhabitable" ([38:17]).
  • "Calling a nuclear meltdown benign is like beyond galaxy brained." – Sean ([34:39])
• Regulatory Rollbacks: Recent US policy slashed nuclear safety rules (e.g., protections for groundwater), heightening risks ([35:22]).
• Bogus Moral Equivalence: Pro-nuclear talking heads (e.g., Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sam Altman) suggest anti-nuclear is pro-coal—framing dissent as dangerous ([36:11]–[37:14]).

Myth 4: Too Complex for Laypeople

• Techno-Jargon as Barrier: Complexity is used to discourage skepticism (analogous to crypto jargon). In reality, nuclear power is an expensive way to "boil water" ([41:16]–[41:59]).
• Small Modular Reactors (SMRs): Heavily hyped, but research says SMRs generate even more waste per energy unit; many pitch this to sell autonomy/no oversight ([44:07]–[45:43]).
  • "Most small modular reactor designs would increase the volume of nuclear waste needing management and disposal by factors like of 2 to 30." ([45:37])

4. Big Tech, Data Centers, and the Nuclear Hype

• AI and Demand Myths: Tech giants claim only atomic can meet future AI/data center energy needs, justifying a nuclear "renaissance" ([50:15]–[51:37]).
• Consumer Guilt: Blame is shifted onto individuals for energy usage as AI is embedded everywhere without user consent ([51:44]–[53:06]).
  • "AI is being embedded into everything by default... Consumer guilt narratives that you’re draining rivers by using chatbots... As if your individual refusal... has any impact whatsoever." – Sean ([51:44])

5. Nuclear's Inextricability from Weaponry

• Atoms for Peace—is a Lie: Civilian nuclear and weapons programs are linked by design; plutonium produced in reactors can be (and has been) weaponized ([56:25]–[57:20]).
  • "You will never have nuclear power without nuclear weapons. They’re inextricably linked by design." – Sean ([56:25])
• Vertical Integration: The same players—Gates, Bezos, Altman—turn up in AI, nuclear startups, mining, and defense, cementing private control over existential risks ([57:20]).

6. Defense Fantasies and AI Nightmares

• Missile Defense as Boondoggle: Billions spent on "golden dome" missile defense that is minimally effective; defense contracts drain social investment ([57:35]–[58:15]).
• AI and Launch Decisions: Studies show military AIs almost always escalate to nuclear use—no de-escalation in simulated crisis ([59:08]).
  • "The AI systems deployed nuclear weapons in 95% of scenarios... de-escalation in zero percent." ([59:08])

7. Apocalypse Logistics: The Devil's Scenario

• Nuclear War Math: In a modeled scenario, a Russia-U.S. exchange after North Korean attack kills 60% of global population in under 72 minutes, followed by decades of nuclear winter and plagues ([63:15]–[64:33]).
  • "The survivors would envy the dead." – Khrushchev, quoted ([64:33])

8. Social & Cultural Fallout

• Atomic Disinformation: New alliances—Silicon Valley, the White House, defense, even climate activists—rebrand nuclear while ridiculing skeptics ([65:28]–[66:53]). - "You'll be called a Luddite, or pro coal, or conspiratorial, just for asking about waste or safety." – Sean ([65:28])
• Radiation Chic, Trad Mining, and the Algorithmic Conspiracy Smog: Atomic critique is being filtered as reactionary or conspiratorial, while the public is blitzed with synthetic AI disinfo ([66:53]).

9. What’s Missing? Political Will, Not Tech

• Renewables Already Work: The missing ingredient for a cleaner grid is not technology, but willpower and priorities ([68:15]–[68:47]).
  • "Atomic power is neither safe nor sustainable... Renewables already work at scale. What's missing is political will." ([68:15])
• Last Word on Fusion & Solutions: Cold fusion isn't real; nuclear as "the only answer" is a manufactured narrative; we can do better with existing renewables and storage ([69:54]).

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "We built a civilization on an energy source inextricably linked to horrific violence that can’t help but poison the people closest to it. Its past and present are also deeply weird and conspiratorial."
  — Sean ([01:50])
• "You will never have nuclear power without nuclear weapons. They're inextricably linked by design."
  — Sean ([56:25])
• "Calling a nuclear meltdown benign is like beyond galaxy brained."
  — Sean ([34:39])
• "Opposing nuclear doesn't mean you're fine with coal deaths. It means you want to replace both with cleaner renewables."
  — Sean ([37:14])
• "Atomic power is neither safe nor sustainable. We do not need to increase energy output tenfold. And renewables already work at scale. What's missing is political will."
  — Sean ([68:15])
• "Before electronic calculator, microwave ovens or Velcro, a group of nerds on a plateau in New Mexico built a space and time shattering nuclear weapon out of whole cloth. In under three years we can figure out battery storage."
  — Sean ([68:47])

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Opening on Nuclear Guilt and Myth-Making: [00:50]–[03:14]
• ICE Shooter, Fallout Maps & Nuclear Secrecy: [03:14]–[06:34]
• QAnon’s Nuclear Origins & Clearance: [06:34]–[07:45]
• Malmstrom AFB UFO/Nuke Incident: [08:14]–[11:46]
• Historical Ties: UFOs and Nuclear Timeline: [11:46]–[15:05]
• Atomic Power in Pop Culture & Lou Elizondo Interview: [15:56]–[19:23]
• Myth-Busting Nuclear's "Greenness": [20:27]–[26:06]
• Waste Storage and Effects: [25:01]–[26:38]
• Energy Myth 2 – Always On: [27:13]–[30:33]
• Myth 3 – Safety & "Benign" Disasters: [33:26]–[39:01]
• Regulatory Rollbacks & Industry Messaging: [35:22]–[37:14]
• Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), Economic Lures: [41:59]–[46:11]
• Nuclear Tech's Weapons Link: [56:25]–[57:20]
• Nuclear Apocalypse Scenario: [61:27]–[64:33]
• Atomic Critique as Conspiracy: [65:28]–[68:47]
• Episode Wrap-up & Final Thoughts: [70:05]–[71:50]

---

Tone & Style

The conversation maintains the QAA Podcast's typical blend of dark wit, gallows humor, skepticism, and accessible but rigorous exploration. Sean's commentary is incisive, often poetic and laced with noir pessimism, while the hosts keep the tone lively, self-deprecating, and irreverently critical of both establishment and fringe thinking.

---

Suggested Further Listening/Reading

• Time Zero Podcast (by Sean J. Patrick Carney): In-depth episodes on nuclear history, culture & technology (notably Ep. 4 “Wastelanding” & Ep. 8 “Deep Time”).
• QAA “Nuked in the Midwest” (with Devin O’Shea): Stories on fallout and nuclear industry impacts.
• NPR reporting on nuclear regulation rollbacks.
• Joseph Masco’s work (“Nuclear Borderlands”, “Future of Fallout”): Social science of nuclear anxiety and myth.

---

A podcast episode of depth, insight, and dark comedy—a must-listen for anyone seeking the real story beneath the “nuclear green” revival.

Transcript

[A]

Sam, if you're hearing this, well done.

[B]

You found a way to connect to the Internet. Welcome to the qaa podcast, episode 363 Neon Green Energy. As always, we are your hosts, Jake

[A]

Rockatansky, Brad Abrahams, Travis Vu, and Sean J. Patrick Carney.

[C]

I want to believe something I've said more than a few times on this pod, this time not about UFOs or the paranormal, though they may be tenuously related here. I want to believe in the idea of clean, abundant energy to feel guilt free when I pump my air conditioner in the 110 degree Austin heat. I don't want it to cause coal miners to get black lung in their 40s or fracking injections to trigger thousands of earthquakes in places that never had them before, or offshore rigs to blow out crude oil coating birds so thick they can't lift their wings, or for clusters of childhood leukemia to appear downwind from aging oil refineries. This misery porn could go on ad infinitum. In my more optimistic, lived out days, I used to think there was an answer for this guilt free nuclear Its virtues have been spewed at and hammered into us by mainstream media, pop science and politicians both left and right as our cleanest hope. And it kind of sort of seemed to be. But as my naive boyish optimism waned and my heart grew darker and heavier, I realized this hope is only true when viewed through the most narrow, myopic field of view in context of a severely revisionist and sanitized history. I didn't truly grasp the how and the why of this until a mysterious evening exactly one year ago. I walked into a beloved bookshop, alienated Majesty for an immersive audio visual presentation called Time Zero. It wove a complex tale of our nuclear history, from the Trinity Test to Three Mile island to kids playing on uranium piles like dirt hills with detours into David lynch and uranium glass parties. It traced how we built a civilization on an energy source inextricably linked to horrific violence that can't help but poison the people closest to it. Its past and present are also deeply weird and conspiratorial. The person behind this performance was Sean J. Patrick Carney. My first contact with him was three years ago, when I received an email with the subject line Ascended Masters. He wanted to cite my Mount Shasta QAA episode and my doc Telos or Bust in an academic essay. I've since known him as a writer, researcher, visual artist, composer, inner Earth believer, and friend whom I just watched assassin33ad with which, if Any of you haven't seen. I highly recommend it.

[B]

Hell, yeah.

[C]

His work is concerned with histories of the American west, and his podcast, Time Zero examines the nuclearized world through cinema, literature, and contemporary art. I think these lenses are much better at capturing the feeling of such an unfathomably complex subject than pure science or policy. So take it away, Sean.

[A]

Mainstream radiation. At 6:40am on September 24, 2025, Joshua Yan opened fire on an ICE detention facility in northwest Dallas, then fatally shot himself. He missed his intended targets and instead struck detainees, two of whom died. The next day. Reporters noted something strange on Yan's abandoned Toyota Corolla. A black and white map of the United States speckled with dark plumes radiating out from southern Nevada. It was the Miller map, a fallout graphic showing everywhere that radioactive clouds from the Nevada test site traveled. See, between 1951 and 1992, the United States exploded 928 nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site just an hour northwest of Las Vegas. 100 of those were above ground with zero containment strategy for fallout, save for attempting to predict desert wind patterns.

[C]

Wait, this was all just an hour outside of Las Vegas?

[A]

Yeah, it was 60 miles as the crow flies, or so.

[C]

That is insane. So almost 1,000 nuclear bombs an hour outside Vegas.

[A]

One every two weeks for 40 years. Yeah.

[B]

They were like, do you think we should go out a little bit further? You know, that there was one kind of anxious guy being like, I don't know, guys, 60. It doesn't feel like enough for one bomb a week. I don't know, guys. He was immediately put in a refrigerator and sent to the, you know, sent to the test site.

[A]

So they call the detonations tests. But setting off a nuclear bomb is setting off a nuclear bomb. Plutonium rained down all over Nevada and Utah and then blew across the country on the wind. And the half life of plutonium is 24,000 years. Nevada is, in fact, the most nuked place on planet Earth.

[B]

Yeah, it kind of makes sense, doesn't it? It's one of the few places where, where smoking cigarettes feels good. It's one of the only white castles on the West Coast. I mean, I think the signs are starting to tell us something.

[A]

You could, in the 1950s, you could go and sit on a Vegas rooftop bar. They would announce the detonations, and you could go sit on the top and have a. Have an atomic themed cocktail and at five o' clock in the morning and watch a nuclear bomb go off.

[B]

And, oh, my God, I've only done that in, like, fallout. The Video game.

[A]

We'll get to that. So why did the ICE shooter have a map of that fallout on his car? In 2017, Jan left Texas for a stint trimming marijuana at a legal farm in Washington State near the Hanford site, a former plutonium production complex on the Columbia River. His parents later told authorities that he'd become convinced he'd gotten radiation sickness. And Jan's not the only recent moment where nuclear has seeped into our feeds. In December, a gunman shot 11 people in a physics and engineering building at Brown University in Providence. And two days later, outside Boston, he murdered MIT fusion scientist Nuno Lorero. Then three days later, Trump Media inked a multi billion dollar deal with tae, a nuclear fusion company. And online posters rushed to cast Lorero's research as a marketplace competitor to tae. So after decades of cultural dormancy, the nuclear is suddenly everywhere. It's in shootings, big tech power fantasies, geopolitics, streaming. Has anybody else clocked that radiation has seemingly gone mainstream?

[C]

Yeah, especially with Fallout, too, being, like, one of the most popular shows.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So you pair that ubiquity with the secrecy that's always surrounded nuclear technology, and you get conspiracy thinking that practically writes itself. And I feel like this is a good time to remind everyone that The Q in QAnon is nuclear in origin. So Q is a DOE designation for nuclear secrets. It's the kind of access or clearance that J. Robert Oppenheimer lost in 1954amid H bomb hysteria and red scare politics.

[B]

Funny enough, I have a brother, one of my brothers in law, one of my brother in law, one of my

[A]

brothers in law, attorneys general, one of

[B]

my associates is an engineer on nuclear submarines. And I don't know more than that. He can't tell us any more than that. But when. When we first met this, like, years and years ago, and I was telling him what. What I did, and I was explaining the podcast, and I was explaining QAnon, because that was very new then and people had no idea what it was. And I was explaining it to him, and I was like, well, on Q, basically, he claims he has, like, Q clearance. And my brother in law, like, kind of sat up straight. He goes, well, that's a real. He goes, that's a real kind of clearance. And I was like, oh. And that was the first time I ever found out that it had anything to do with, like, nuclear stuff.

[A]

It's wild. Yeah, it's. I mean, this is sort of the. The Department of Energy and kind of nuclear secrets and nuclear policy is frequently behind more things than we think that it would be if you kind of scratch at stuff long enough. A lot of policy decisions and other things, security are built around the nuclear infrastructure. So with all this in mind, let's start in a place where secrecy, nukes and high weirdness have been glued together for decades. And that's a missile field in Montana in the spring of 1967.

[D]

Silos and saucers My name is Robert Salas. In 1967, I was a first lieutenant stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana. I was a missile launch officer.

[A]

One night in March 1967, Salas was about 60ft underground in a control capsule built to take an apocalyptic hit and still be able to turn launch keys. From bases like Malmstrom, crews monitored what are called flights of Minutemen intercontinental ballistic missiles ICBMs spread across the prairies in Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska. Around 8:45pm that night, all 10 missiles in Salas flight suddenly went offline. Years later, Salas would tell a version of the story that turned a malfunction into UFO cannon. Moments before the missiles went dark, a security guard topside called down about strange lights near the gate. Salas brushed it off until minutes later, the guard called again.

[D]

This time he was screaming into the phone saying, they're looking at an object, a red glowing object hovering just above our front gate.

[A]

And just as Sallust hangs up to alert command, the board crashes.

[D]

Our missiles began going into what's called a no go condition or unlaunchable. Essentially, they were disabled.

[A]

Salas says his superiors ordered silence afterward. When he went public in the 1990s, he didn't lead with aliens. But over time, his account hardened into an accusation that the government was hiding UFO information and exploiting exotic technology for weapons. Salas has appeared multiple times on coast to coast am. Not that there's anything wrong with it.

[C]

Definitely not. His name sounded familiar and I realized he's at like every UFO convention and I've, yeah, I've seen him speak before, but it's funny, I. I quickly looked them up to jog my memory. And in, in the personal life section on Wikipedia, it says that according to Solace, he admires Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff and, and that he, he seeks to model himself after them.

[A]

So insider trading. He's very so. And take this with a grain of salt. So. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that an internal Pentagon review traced the Malmstrom shutdown to the test of a secret electromagnetic pulse device. An say also produced a brilliant atmospheric orange light and Officials never told operators about the test, they say because it confirmed something that they didn't want leaked to the Soviets, which is that EMPs like the kind created by an incoming nuke exploding would have incapacitated our ability to retaliate. And so while the Air Force never endorsed Salas UFO link, they didn't exactly suffer from it either. Starting in the 50s, the Air Force knowingly ceded UFO disinformation around the Nevada test ranges and the mythology that grew up around Area 51. Richard Doty. Yes, Brad, that Richard Doty later acknowledged feeding UFO researchers bogus stories as part of OSI operations. And I want to be clear, this doesn't explain every sighting, but it does help to steer attention towards saucers and recovered bodies and away from the real classified story, which is a massive taxpayer funded buildout of nuclear weapons and later domestic surveillance. And it creates this perfect double bind. If you point out defense incentives, you're covering up the real UFOs. If you debunk the alien and tech angle, you're doing PR for the deep state. It's like we're living in the LXIX files, which are the roman numerals for 69 sort of impulse. All right, you get going.

[C]

Bombshells.

[A]

If you rewind the US nuclear timeline, our UFO lore rewinds with it. In January 1945, the Hanford Complex, the place Ice Shooter Jan thought poisoned him decades later, was producing plutonium for the world's first atomic bombs. A Navy radar operator, Bud Clem later said an unknown intruder appeared on radar. Fighters scrambled, but a glowing red fireball outran them. In 1947, Roswell Army Field was home to the 509th Bombardment Group, the unit that had two years prior dropped the bombs on Japan. And that July 1947 personnel were sent to investigate a crash in the desert. Now a foundational American UFO story. In September 64 near Vandenberg, Lt. Robert Jacobs later claimed his team filmed an object shadowing a missile test and firing a beam team that knocked a dummy warhead off course. And a few Years later, Salas 10 Minutemen go offline in Montana. And what follows are decades of cannot confirm or deny events and need to know situations. Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union foment a culture of extreme secrecy around nuclear production facilities and atomic weapons. Information vacuums around literally existential topics breed speculation. And if we Fast forward to 2025, the documentary Age of Disclosure, previously covered by Brad prominently platforms. Lou Elizondo, former Department of Defense employee and current proprietor of Bombshells American cantina in Buffalo, Wyoming. And Brad, I wanted to ask, in your reporting, did you happen to check out the logo for Bombshells, which of course listeners can't see, but I've got pulled up here. Do you want to describe what we're looking at?

[C]

Jake, do you want to do. Want to give us a description here?

[B]

Sure. It's. It's like a propaganda poster. It's. It's on a white background, inexplicably hanging. Hanging from two paper clips. Like, look at the top. It's like those two tiny little paper holders. What's the point?

[C]

Did you put those on, Sean?

[A]

No, that's. I think this is. You could order this as a poster. But it's just a poster that has the logo on it. Yeah.

[B]

Yes, but inexplicably it also has like, like these graphics of the paper clips holding the poster in imaginary space. We're not even on the image and I'm melting away. Okay, so. So the title is Bombshells. It looks AI. Is it not? Is this before it does?

[E]

It looks AI.

[A]

It looks very looks AI.

[B]

This is a woman in a. She's wearing long leggings and Those aren't

[C]

leggings, those are pantyhose with garters.

[B]

Oh, shows what I know. Okay, Pantyhose. She's got like a military. An officer's cap on. She's saluting. She's in a very shortcut kind of like military dress. It's like half uniform, half Dr. You know, 1950s, like USO style. And she is sitting on an atomic bomb. One of three being dropped. Actually probably one of four because it looks like the fourth has exploded in the background because there's a giant mushroom cloud. So these are the three following bomb. She's riding on the last one and it's got the angry face painted on it. Like the 810 Warthog, you know? Yeah, it's got the angry face with the, with the, with the teeth. And at the bottom it says American Cantina.

[A]

You know, I believe that the model of the bomb that she's riding on, it appears to be the Little Boy uranium gun type device, which is what they exploded over Hiroshima and also after which one of the rooms at the Mothership comedy club is named. Those are called Little Boy and Fox.

[E]

Really?

[A]

They're named after the bombs that we dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

[B]

Classy Joe Rogan names his comedy rooms after the two.

[A]

I. I assume because people bomb in them. I.

[B]

That's.

[A]

I don't. But you wouldn't want that to happen. I don't know. It's interesting.

[B]

Yeah, everybody loves, yeah, everybody loves going to the, to the 911 room at the, you know, the comedy at the comedy club. Because that's where. Yeah, that's where like two towers, towering comedians fall over.

[C]

I don't know.

[B]

I'm gonna go.

[A]

So my interest in Elizondo is nuclear related. He's a major evangelizer of this idea that nuclear technology attracts extraterrestrial and even extra dimensional attention. Here he is on Washington post live in June 2021.

[D]

That is one of the concerns we have from a national security perspective that there does seem to be some sort of congruency or some sort of intersection between these UAP or UFO sight sightings and our nuclear technology with nuclear propulsion, nuclear power and generation or nuclear weapons systems. Furthermore, the same observations have been seen overseas in other countries. They too have had the same incidents. So that tells us this is a global issue. Now in this country we've had incidents where these UAPS have interfered and actually brought offline our nuclear capabilities. And I think to some they would probably say, well, that's a sign that whatever this is, is something that is peaceful. But in the same context, we also have data suggesting that in other countries these things have interfered with their nuclear technology and actually turned them on, put them online. So that is equally for me just as concerning. I think that there is certainly at this point enough data to, to, to demonstrate there is an interest in our nuclear technology, a potential to even interfere with that nuclear technology.

[E]

So I mean, yeah, this is the Star Trek first contact. Princip. Yeah, these, they're noticing that we're getting closer to warp technology, which of course nuclear, I assume is the first step towards that. And as soon as we achieve warp drive, then the Vulcans will come down to make their presence known.

[A]

We can only hope so by offline Elizondo, of course means the missiles are effectively taken out of commission. That's what happened at Malmstrom in 1967. And by put them online, he's invoking the nightmare inversion and nuclear weapon systems mysteriously turning on. Journalist and occasional Coast To Coast Am host George Knapp has repeated a Russian version of that story. An October 1982 incident at a Soviet ICBM base in Ukraine where Knapp says a UFO appeared over the facility. And the missiles, which are aimed at the United States, suddenly powered up launch codes are allegedly entered and operators cannot stop the sequence. Then as abruptly as it began, the system shuts down. And stories like this can make nuclear technologies Feel like a cosmic revelation. And there's a built in narrative accelerant. Uranium, the radioactive element needed for everything from small modular reactors to hydrogen bombs, is technically alien in origin. Uranium was forged in stellar catastrophes long before Earth even formed and got mixed into the raw material that became our planet. It embedded into Earth's nascent rocky crust where it lay dormant for billions of years until we learn to dig it up in the disclosure ecosystem. These provide ready made scripts. Elizondo and his cohort flirt with the idea that aliens are here to warn us away from nuclear technology or to bait us into using it. They also float a second even more convenient premise that governments have recovered non human tech, folded it into weapons, energy and transport systems, and hidden it from the public. It's cinematic and elastic, permitting endless reinterpretation and importantly, a certain disavowal of responsibility for the technologies. But if you want jaw dropping cover ups, you don't need interstellar stakes. For the last 80 years, the nuclear weapons and atomic energy industries have been directing a disaster film in real time.

[C]

And is, is that House of Dynamite?

[A]

Yeah, they've been working on it for 80 years. It's incredible what they've achieved.

[B]

I mean, I remember this happening in real time when NFL game day went from using sprites to using polygons. All of a sudden there was a massive jump in the technology. I mean, we went from, you know, we went from Nintendo 64 to the PlayStation Entertainment System. But like, all jokes aside, I see people say this all the time. Is they'll say, look at, you know, look at our cell phones. Look at how quick technology jumped from 19, you know, the 1950s to how it is now. You know, you don't. And they use that basically as a reasoning for the government folding in, you know, gifted alien technology and then repackaging it and selling it at a premium to, to its citizens. It's beautiful, the touchscreen. Remember what happened, what happened before, there were buttons and then all of a sudden it was a screen and there was a keyboard on a screen. Nothing raised. I just had to trust my thumbs. It was crazy.

[A]

Miss me with that. Not bad grow. Over the last year, we've seen a full court press for the return of atomic power from an unlikely alliance. The Trump administration, Democrats, big tech and green startups. They pitch it as a panacea, clean baseload power that can meet climate goals, stabilize the grid, and keep data centers humming. I mean, that does sound pretty great, right?

[C]

Yeah, I can't see anything wrong with

[E]

that on my end.

[A]

It's perfect. I mean, it's like, I can't believe we haven't done this before. And, of course, I want to be clear that I get the appeal for anybody who's nuclear Curious. Like, I want an energy fix, too. But what we're being sold is another techno solution built on this time, four central myths. So, myth one is that nuclear power is green and clean. It's true that the white clouds rising from cooling towers are water vapor and not CO2. The mess is everything nuclear depends on before the plant runs and everything it leaves behind after. So if we start at the front end. Uranium. It's been disproportionately mined on indigenous land from the Congo during the Manhattan Project to the Navajo Nation during the Cold War, to Havasupai sites near the Grand Canyon. Today, on the Navajo Nation alone, there are at least 500 abandoned uranium mines. Dust and runoff still move through the air, and communities were basically never warned about the risks. In some places, people even built earthen homes with contaminated material.

[C]

Man. So just like, homes out of, like, you know, uranium dust.

[A]

Yeah. So when a mine bails. Right. They leave tailings behind these huge mountains of sand. And if you build earthen architecture. Yeah. Pulverized, smashed dirt makes excellent adobe. Right. I mean, of course you're going to fill up your truck bed. It's a free way to build your home. And you have no reason to think that there's anything wrong with it. Why would they leave it there if. If it were dangerous? Right. So the 1979 Church Rock uranium spill on the Navajo Nation dumped 94 million gallons of radioactive waste into the Puerco River. It's the single largest release of radioactive material in US History, having unleashed more than three times the radiation emitted from the Three Mile island meltdown, which happened just a few months earlier. And yet most people have never heard about it.

[C]

Yeah, I hadn't heard about it till hearing your presentation and listening to your podcast. Like, which is shocking considering the devastation that it wrought.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

This picture you've included of these uranium slurry pods is, like, one of the scariest things I've ever seen in my life. It just, like, looks like two hits into hell.

[A]

Yeah. So those are. Those are from a drone photograph by Shayla Blatchford, who's a dine activist and artist and has a great project called Anti Uranium Mapping Project. And there are other artists like Will Wilson and all these people that I talk to on the Time Zero podcast who have documented this stuff and tried to raise alarms and Raise awareness. But you can't see these things from the highway right when you're passing by. But then you get above them and they're, I mean, it's terrifying. And that's what broke open. The berms on those broke and went into the river.

[C]

Oh my God.

[A]

Just absolutely devastating. And the hazards were not a mystery. European uranium miners lung disease was documented by the late 1800s. And by 1932, uranium mining cancer was an officially recognized occupational disease in Germany and Czechoslovakia. So this is a decade before the industry arrives on Navajo land. And modern uranium companies sell themselves as high tech. And you know, I can get into all that if people want, but the core fact doesn't change. Ripping a radioactive element out of the ground is extremely dangerous. And the timelines are geologic. The half life of uranium is 4.5 billion years, which is the approximate age of planet Earth.

[E]

So, so it will be, you know, habitable just, just shortly before the sun swallows the earth.

[A]

I mean, it's also like, and I feel like this term, people use this term a lot, right? Like half life. And it's in its, that just means that it's half as radioactive at 4.5 billion years. So in 9 billion years it'll still be 25% as radioactive. And it's just sort of like these are timelines that like, are impossible to comprehend. And this idea that we're kind of like. Or that we're kind of like, oh yeah, I mean, we'll manage this stuff. It's like, dude, what are you talking about? In addition to the front end, then there's the back end. And this is another thing that people never want to talk about, which is high level nuclear waste. And the United States has produced tens of thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel. Fuel. And we have absolutely no permanent disposal site. It's literally sitting at the plants. A bunch of it is in temporary pools, like water, and some of it's in concrete casks.

[C]

I bet that water is like nice and warm though.

[A]

Well, they're re racking them because they've run out of space. So they're filling it beyond. And then, yes, they heat up. They, the water is evaporating and if they overheat, they explode basically and create like, you know, like they can, they can fission essentially. And oftentimes nuclear plants are near major bodies of water. The Great Lakes, major rivers, the coasts. They need a lot of water to stay cool. Besides the fact that this waste is just sitting there, there's literally nowhere to put it. No one has anywhere to Put it, everything that nuclear waste touches becomes contaminated too. And you can imagine on these chains how much stuff that actually is. And just imagine raw chicken hands in the kitchen. But like, nobody's invented soap or trash cans. And the anthropologist Joseph Moscow calls this a derangement. Nuclear nations are promising dispos disposal tech that will exist someday. Just trust us. While fantasizing about institutions stable enough to manage waste for tens of thousands of years, when nothing humans have ever built lasts on that scale. Not even Gobekli Tepe. Brad, I know you like Gobekli Tepe. And that was buried, that lasted a

[C]

while, but you know, that was, I don't know, 4,000 years. Maybe it lasted.

[A]

No, I think that is like older than agriculture, but it is still backfilled and nothing on it. Like we don't know anything about it. The point is that you can't warn people. You can't actually properly store something that long. And so, you know, but you think, like, surely tech visionaries like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, they've outlined innovative solutions for the nuclear waste that their cutting edge facilities are going to produce, right? I mean, yes, it would be illegal if they hadn't.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

No. And so, even before you count mining, milling, enrichment, transport and round the clock security, nuclear plants are carbon intensive. To build for atomic power, carbon neutral requires increasingly liberal definitions. If you want the full version of the uranium story, I go deep in time 0 episode 4, which is called Wastelanding. And if you want the waste story, that's episode eight, deep time. The second myth here is unlike solar or wind, nuclear power is always on. I don't know if y' all saw Billy Bob Thornton's viral windmill rant from Landman.

[C]

I. I did not, no, no.

[B]

But I would like to.

[A]

We've gotta roll that beautiful bean footage. Please, Mr. Oil man, tell me how the wind is bad for the environment. You have any idea how much diesel

[D]

they have to burn to mix that much concrete or make that steel and

[A]

haul this shit out here and put it together with a 450 foot crane? You want to guess how much oil

[D]

it takes to lubricate that fucking thing?

[A]

Or winterize it in its 20 year

[D]

lifespan, it won't offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don't get me started on solar panels. And the lithium in your Tesla battery,

[A]

okay, like, this is so patently, it's like beyond untrue. Like, windmills typically offset their carbon footprint in like a matter of months. So Billy Bob's rant, you know, written probably by Taylor Sheridan or his proxies. It makes for really good tv, but it is absolute petroleum propaganda. Like renewables, we're told, are a granola fantasy. Oil and gas are realistic and dependable.

[B]

I love that. Even our like TV shows now are like, you dumb live these windmill. These windmills are worse for the environment, actually.

[A]

I mean I'm a, I'm a landman watcher. I don't know, not a lover, but I'm a landman watcher faithful. And it is, it's one of the blackest pilled shows I've ever seen in my life. I mean it is, it is dark.

[B]

I guess we got. I guess I gotta watch it. I was like sort of vaguely aware of its existence. Always vaguely aware of Billy Bob. Like I'm always curious where he's at, you know, make sure he's not too close.

[C]

Make sure he's not too close, like physically. You mean to you?

[A]

Yeah. So I mean, I want to be clear. Like wind and solar, I've been outside like they are. They're variable. That's true. Like the sun sets, wind fluctuates. And grid planners have a name for the mismatch between when solar peaks and when evening demand spikes. Right? And you guys can see I've got a chart on here, it's called the duck curve because it's shaped like a duck, right? Sun's high in the day, but people don't use as much energy. Uh oh, sun goes away, what do we do? But treating not always on as a fatal flaw is a rhetorical trick because nothing's magically always on. Not coal, not oil, not solar, not nuclear. Every energy system depends on infrastructure, maintenance, supply chains, planning. It needs to be turned on. The real question is reliability at the grid level. And as places like Germany, a major industrial nation, have shown, renewables are reliable if you build for it with transmission, storage and smarter demand. And this is where the United States is embarrassingly behind. It has nothing to do with feasibility and everything to do with economic incentives and a total lack of political will from both parties. Our privatized system rarely produces energy innovations, instead rewarding both dangerous shortcuts and inefficient bloats so long as those produce profits. And that's where the nuclear renaissance becomes a very convenient atomic startups soak up attention and policy bandwidth while fossil fuel companies keep selling themselves as the bridge in the meantime. And the longer that renewables are cast as unreliable, the longer that bridge keeps printing money. Which brings me to myth number three, nuclear power is actually very safe. So 3 Ma Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. Would you guys want a nuclear power plant like I don't. Like a mile from your house?

[B]

Well,

[E]

you know, I. I've lived in Orange county, which is pretty close to San Clemente, so, you know.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I grew up 50 miles from one from the Big Rock Point plant, which Ronald Reagan was doing ads for before he was the president. There's a great, there's a great ad of him selling Michigan this nuclear power plant.

[C]

I lived like, yeah, 30 minute drive from Pickering plant in Ontario. And we did a school trip there once when I was in elementary school. And there's people fishing with the runoff water from the plant because the water's so warm, the fish really like it. And I'm sure like that water's like technically not radioactive, but just as a kid looking at that, it's like. That doesn't seem right. That's very Simpsons.

[A]

Truly. Yes, we were as far away from

[B]

any kind of nuclear plant as possible because Michael was one of the scientists who built the bomb. And. Wait, what?

[C]

Wait, Jake, every story you're bringing up

[A]

here is like, this is a reveal, okay?

[B]

And he and his like, team, like begged Truman, like, not to use it. They were like, you know, they were told that it was being built so that it could be used as a threat. And they signed this petition, basically. I'm sure, Sean, you know all about it. They signed this petition begging the president to not use it or at the very least to let the opposition know what kind of devastation that this would wreak. And of course they ended up dropping the bomb. And he like totally like radicalized and like quit science and became like a, like a weird artist for the rest of his life. So my family was like, very anti nuclear. We'll probably have to cut all this out. Cause it reveals, like, probably a little too much personal information. But I do have a personal connection to the atomic bomb, which is pretty crazy.

[C]

We'll just change that again to colleague.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, my very elderly colleague. My very mature colleague. Well, that's. I mean, that's where the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, this like academic institution comes out of, based in Chicago, is a lot of people after the Manhattan Project who are kind of like, yeah. So the idea though, you know, Jake, not to point a finger at anybody else, but your peasant, like, fear of atomic energy is the only.

[B]

It's the only peasant. Like. And I. That's not an insult to me. To me, I am one of the commoners and I'm proud of it.

[A]

So that's, apparently that's the only reason we don't have a mesh network of small modular reactors powering autonomous economic zones all over this great country. And that's, that's very seriously though, the vibe that you'll hear from nuclear startup enthusiasts as they raise VC round after VC round. The problem isn't safety, it's you, it's your ignorance, it's your irrational dread, your failure to appreciate abundant energy. And a very slick version of this argument is making the rounds on business tv. Here's Mark Nelson, who's the founder and managing director of something called Radiant Energy Group on cnbc.

[C]

Many people think that meltdowns created the anti nuclear movement.

[A]

That's not the case.

[C]

Meltdowns confirmed to the anti nuclear movement that they were right and converted a

[A]

lot of people who were previously pro nuclear or neutral.

[C]

Because there was already an anti nuclear movement based on fear of nuclear weapons fear and opposition to abundant energy, it was able to reinterpret and add public fear to otherwise essentially benign accidents like Three Mile Island. I don't think the opposition is ever classified as being against abundant energy. I don't think that's something that people don't want. Also, that guy's mustache is very wrong.

[B]

I thought that we were watching like an SNL skit at first. I was like, well, if you want to, you know, if you want to, you know, if you want people to sort of like believe, you know what you say about nuclear energy, you gotta like stop dressing like you're in a school play.

[E]

But like, yeah, yeah, the phrase, yeah, opposition to abundant energy. That's, that's, that's a real great rhetorical move. It's like my opponents who hate puppies and rainbows, you know,

[B]

this guy doesn't like drinking water.

[A]

It's the, it's that phrase, it's this opposition to abundant energy. But the one that really sticks in my craw, I think is essentially benign accidents like Three Mile Island. And calling calling a nuclear meltdown benign is like beyond galaxy brained. It's like, and you'll notice too like the dangers that Mark Nelson and other people's worldview totally erases. And that's the uranium extraction and remediation on the front end and the back end, which is radioactive waste that has absolutely nowhere to go. And further troubling, NPR reported in February that the Trump administration had effectively obliterated environmental and worker protections for new reactors. The article read in part, NPR's review

[E]

of the rules found substantial changes that experts warned had the potential to undermine safety, security and environmental protections at the new reactors. The orders slashed hundreds of pages of requirements for training guards and securing nuclear material. They also loosened protections for things like groundwater.

[B]

Groundwater well protections were very tight.

[E]

In total, the new orders cut 750 pages from the earlier versions of the rules. According to NPR's analysis, that means roughly two thirds of the original pages were eliminated.

[A]

It's just incredible. It basically is just like when you build a new nuclear reactor, you don't have to think about groundwater. I don't know how else to more explicitly be like, these people want to kill you.

[C]

Yeah, but we all, you know, don't we all have like, Brita water filters at home?

[A]

Sure, I've got my Berkey.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, you don't want.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

There's another coordinated message that you're going to be hearing a lot of, you know, coal power plants, because of their emissions, they cause a certain number of deaths every year, far more dangerous than nuclear power plants. So that was Elon Musk and here's Bill Gates. You know, nuclear has actually been safer

[B]

than any other source of generation.

[A]

You know, coal plants, coal particulate, natural gas pipelines blowing up.

[B]

You know, the deaths per unit of power on these other approaches are far higher. I don't like how his arms are crossed as he's telling us that he looks shady. He looks a little bit like he's trying to sell you some bonds.

[A]

And here is Sam Altman. You know, like, a lot more people

[B]

have died of air pollution than nuclear reactors, for example. But we worry.

[A]

Most people worry more about living next to a nuclear reactor than a coal plant.

[C]

So we have three three kings. Three kings so far, telling us not to worry.

[A]

Dream, blunt rotation.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So sure, like, coal pollution is absolutely a slow cumulative harm and it kills a lot of people. But this is total sleight of hand. They want you to hear anti nuclear and translate that as pro coal. And of course, that's nonsense. Like, opposing nuclear doesn't mean you're fine with coal deaths. It means you want to replace both with cleaner renewables that don't require violent uranium extraction or impossible waste timelines. They're invoking a bogus moral equivalence to make dissent feel irresponsible. And that's like accusing someone who wants safer airplanes of being pro car crash. So you're concerned about airline safety. Well, I don't want to die. It is imperative to underscore that Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima were not worst case scenarios, not by a long shot a French safety assessment modeled a severe accident where the reactor pressure vessel actually explodes, releasing everything inside. And so in this like study, half of northern France and large parts of Germany became uninhabitable.

[C]

That's just with one reactor.

[A]

That's one. That's if just the reactor vessel burst, which has never happened before, but if it did, half of northern France, large swaths of Germany, you can never live in them again. And the economic cost of this just, just in the immediate aftermath was something like 5 trillion euros, which is like, I mean, that's not even like a. What does that figure even mean? But that's five times what it has cost over the last 15 years to the date that we're recording of the Fukushima meltdown. And I want to be clear that this hypothetical, it's not dreamed up by anti nuclear activists or alarmists, Right? This came from the very pro nuclear French government whose grid runs on 70% nuclear power. So they're the ones saying that this is what's going to happen if.

[B]

Oh, God.

[A]

So when somebody tells you that nuclear is very safe, what they usually mean is the probability of disaster is low enough that they're willing to roll the dice, especially if the consequences land on someone else somewhere else later.

[B]

Only human beings would be like, we're gonna bet on the safe thing that if it goes wrong, it opens like a portal to hell, essentially.

[A]

I mean, it's like, I know, it's like, it's like, yeah, this thing doesn't release any CO2, but if it breaks,

[B]

they're like, if it fails, you do realize it is gonna open a portal to hell and like huge swaths of the planet will be uninhabitable for centuries to come. Right. And they're like, but it's a small chance.

[A]

Right. And so, you know, this kind of like this banking on it, like not playing out in your own timeline, you know. Subscribers may remember the story of Mallinckrodt Uranium and St. Louis from Devin O' Shea's recent episode Nuked in the Midwest. Right. It's this idea of like, well, it's probably not going to happen to me right now. And you know, I don't know about you guys, but if Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman are all telling me that something is good, I assume they mean it is good for them. Yeah, you know, a key trick across the board here is mystification. If you're made to feel too simple to get it, you'll stop asking questions and that brings me to Myth 4. The technology is simply too complex for you to understand. And you've seen this move with crypto, right? You drown people in jargon so they stop asking what the thing actually does. And the same pattern has emerged in the renewed push for nuclear energy. Proponents lean into futuristic pitches for insanely expensive to build technologies that at the end of the day, boil water to make steam. And if it doesn't scale, it's never the industry's fault. It's your cowardice or the government's bureaucratic hurdles. But, you know, I want to be clear. This is the United States. When has public disapproval or regulation reliably stopped something lucrative? Tobacco, the Iraq war, oxycontin? Like, come on, like public sentiment and like Congress do not stop stuff from happening that makes money.

[B]

Yeah. It's insane. They've gone back to now that cigarettes are safe. I've lived through that. The cigarettes are dangerous to vapes are better to that. We don't know what's in the vapes. To the vapes might be more dangerous dangerous than the cigarettes now. And cigarettes might be the safer alternative.

[A]

So popcorn lung.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Imagine if you could popcorn lung your local water ecosystem through a. Through water vapor. But atomic power is not alien level technology. Its premise is simple enough for just about everybody to wrap their head around. Nuclear plants use uranium as fuel. And inside their reactor, atoms split in a controlled chain reaction, and that releases heat. That heat turns water into steam, and that steam spins a turbine, and the turbine makes electricity. The engineering is elaborate. Yes. But the basic idea is not. In short, nuclear is an extremely expensive, tightly controlled atomic teakettle. And I wanted to ask if you all have heard about small modular reactors. Oh, yeah. If you've heard anything about SMRs.

[C]

Yes, I hear about them all the time. That this is the future. And nearby Austin, at Texas A and M University, there's. They're trying to build some and spin them up. They're trying to build those ones underground in a pit. And then when it sort of like, I guess outlives itself, they're just gonna, like, put some dirt on top of it to bury it.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Then dig another hole for another one.

[A]

Getting closer to the groundwater table does seem to me like. Yeah, that seems good.

[B]

Yeah. They should just save everybody time and start building them directly on top of the earth's core.

[A]

Yeah. Or you could do like General Electric and push the Japanese. Japanese to build it on a cliff in an area that's prone to, I don't know, earthquakes and I don't know, see what happens there. Maybe that saves a few dollars though, you know, in the, in the fiscal quarters, you know.

[B]

So funny. I've been thinking about, as we've been recording, this is like there's like you never see like a 2012 like style disaster movie about like nuclear reaction, like a nuclear explosion. Like of course they did the amazing like Chernobyl series on hbo, but like you never see like a big popcorn flick about like it's always like, like something, it's never anything man made unless it's like AI or technology. Right. They'll let like AI be the bad guy kind of. But it's always like an earthquake or like a tsunami or a meteor hits, you know, or a big volcano or something. But like I've never seen a, like a disaster movie that's like, oh, the nuke, all the nuclear power plants, like fucking, you know, somebody hacked them and they're all like, you know, they're all going to blow up at once. I wonder if that's intentional. If like the government is like, well, hey, what if, what if it was a volcano and stuff.

[E]

Well, back in the 70s there was the, the China Syndrome.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[E]

Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon was nominated for Academy Awards. It's very popular, but. Right. But in my lifetime it seems like that the nuclear sort of disaster flick is sort of been faded away. It's not, not something that's common as common or it just doesn't feature anymore at all.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

I wonder why that is.

[A]

Yeah, the China Syndrome came out, I think it was like a few weeks before Three Mile Island.

[B]

Whoa, that's crazy. I'm surprised more conspiracists aren't on that one.

[A]

Well, Joseph Moscow, who I mentioned before, who wrote the Nuclear Borderlands, this book called the Future of Fallout, this anthropologist, he's at University of Chicago. I interviewed Joseph for the podcast and he writes a lot about that, you know, that desire of Americans to see their country obliterated again and again. And how though after the fall of the Soviet Union you see this massive drop off of nuclear related films, there are very few that have anything to do with that because that anxiety kind of is replaced by whatever like climate, natural disasters, things like that. But that there's. That it absolutely did sort of disappear from the consciousness. Which is what's so kind of interesting about the last maybe few years. That it has really, really kind of feels like it's back. Right. So back to smarts or small modular reactors. These are sold as futuristic factory built plug and Play power plants. It's like an ikea fide atomic energy. But the basic idea of smarts is not new. Small reactor concepts have been around for decades and they were largely sidelined because they didn't make economic sense. What's new is the marketing and the money. SMRs are catnip for venture capital and they pair really neatly with these special economic zone crowd. So you got these private micro grids as mini fiefdoms less about energy autonomy than autonomy from any kind of government oversight. And the kicker here is that small doesn't mean less waste. There's this team of researchers from Stanford and University of British Columbia and they did this case study and they found that most small modular reactor designs would increase the volume of nuclear waste needing management and disposal by factors like of 2 to 30.

[C]

So wait, wait wait wait wait. So, so these are, these are supposed

[A]

to be better but 30 times as

[C]

much waste but it's somehow better?

[A]

Uhhuh. Yes, it's. It boggles the mind. Now I want to be fair energy startup Oklo, which is owned in part by OpenAI Sam Altman, they recently launched their Aurora powerhouse small modular reactor at Idaho National Laboratory. So that was a big deal, but with nuclear fuel in short supply, right now it's running on natural gas.

[B]

Gas.

[C]

Oh okay. It's

[A]

the small modular reactor.

[B]

It's running on the anti, the anti nuclear nuclear reactor at the Idaho National

[A]

Laboratory which famously had two meltdowns in the beginning of first nuclear disaster. Now the other salvation technology here is nuclear fusion, right? And this involves heating fuel to more than 100 million degrees Celsius. Oh, that's hotter than the sun. And see the problem is is that that when you do that it can't touch anything, right? Because it explodes everything. So they're trying to figure out how to use suspend that maybe plasma, I don't know. So they have to chase this power source that scientists, you know this, it's this running joke that it's always 30 years away. For now though, it definitely remains more science fiction promised than a climate plan. And you know all of this is to say it's oversimplified. I really go into this in a two part episode seven if you want to know more about nuclear energy. But all of this is to say that the next time that you're with well meaning people whose hearts are in the right place and they're talking up nuclear as a climate fix, I hope that you do feel empowered to push back a little bit because the fact is nuclear isn't green. Or clean. It's a volatile chain, front to back. And the stakes are absolutely enormous. Machines fail, meltdowns are inevitable, especially in privatized energy economies where the incentives to cut costs are legion and where the startups pushing this stuff very famously move fast and break things. That's their entire thing. And you know the question, will a truly catastrophic reactor bursting event like the one modeled in France happen? I don't know. But if your solution to climate change is boiling water with a technology that can render whole regions uninhabitable, when it fails, you'd better have a reason. You can't do anything else. And the thing is, we can. After 70 years, nuclear still supplies maybe a tenth of global electricity and only a small slice of total energy.

[C]

What about in the United States, do you know?

[A]

Like, roughly almost 20%, depending on the year.

[C]

Year, yeah. Which is still. Still seems like really low.

[A]

It is really low. And there's a reason. I mean, you think about this, we've had, you know, commercial reactors come online in like the 1950s, so we're looking at like almost eight. Right. The. The bomb. Yeah. First bombs, 1945. A decade later, we have nuclear power, but it's been 70 plus years. And this, if they wanted to, if this actually worked, they would have done it.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

Right.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, it's not like the fossil fuel lobby is of course powerful, but they're also adaptable. Bowl. And if this really were going to integrate, they would have done like what Philip Morris did with Joule. Right. Like, you would adapt, you would integrate, you would, you would become part of those things. So, yeah, and I think that this is the part that people need to hear, like, nuclear is not, quote, the future. It cannot physically scale quickly, cheaply or safely enough to get us to net zero. And the basic way to think about this is that nuclear represents on one side a dinosaur industry looking for a bailout out, and on the other, vampiric startups looking for a cash out. An atomic rug pole.

[C]

Cool.

[B]

I would encourage Mark Zuckerberg to try and build some kind of sun in his laboratories. He should tell like his assistants and stuff to like, maybe like get out of the room. But, but he, but he and his top level execs, I, I do, I do think that they should. You guys should be working on mini sun technology. I think less than 30 years away. You could do it tomorrow if you wanted to.

[A]

They should do it at Bohemian Grove.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, that's a good.

[C]

But you know, we just learned that Conan o' Brien is a is a member.

[A]

I didn't know that. Yes, officially the first Irish Catholic admitted.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

We're going to have to go in there and like kidnap him like they did Steven Spielberg off the Twilight Zone movie set.

[A]

Conan rushing into a goblin's nest.

[B]

Oh, man. And here I thought nuclear was medium to medium bad at best. And I come to find out that it's really bad. And it's not even powering that much shit, 10% worldwide. I'm assuming that we're still all gas, baby. All gas down all the time.

[A]

We're pretty gassed up.

[B]

Yeah, we're gassed. Yeah, we're smoking that diesel.

[A]

Think of the data centers. The big tech pitch for a nuclear renaissance is that electricity demand is about to explode. In the ignition is AI, a massive data center build out that they claim only atomic power can realistically supply. This is presented as a foregone conclusion, which glosses over an important fact. Even after the dawn of the Internet, US electricity demand stayed relatively flat for decades. Efficiency gains kept pace with new technologies. You get better chips and cooling, LEDs, smarter appliances. Historically, tech doesn't brute force scale. It miniaturizes and optimizes. Today's AI boosters, by contrast, seem weirdly uninterested in that tradition. Instead, we get a dominant energy strategy that's both myopic and dangerous. Bigger models, more compute, more everything than a backfilled justification of inevitable demand. What they're pitching has the retro futuristic Jetsons kitsch of the fault. Fallout games where abundant nuclear energy disincentivizes efficiency. In that atom punk world, there's no need to make things smaller or smarter. You just dump more power into them. And that's why Fallout's future looks like America's past. Refrigerator sized radios, chrome dashboards. And there's also a psychological pull. A future defined by nostalgia for a past glory. And it makes you wonder, is it really that surprising that MAGA and Silicon Valley are completely aligned on this thing?

[B]

I want to set the world on fire,

[A]

so I want to be clear about something. This imagined electricity demand is not on you, dear listener. The AI boom isn't being driven by regular people deciding to consume 10 times more electricity. AI is being embedded into everything by default. Search results, email, customer service, photo tools, social feeds, fitness apps, whether you ask for it or not. Not yet. You're already hearing consumer guilt narratives that you're draining rivers by using chatbots or making Shrek sexy. As if your individual refusal to use chat GPT has any impact whatsoever on industrial scale buildouts. It's the plastic straw ban all over again.

[B]

At my. My partner's last colleague. My. Yeah, my colleague's last job. My colleague who I live with at their last job, they. There was a new woman who came in. She was older than everybody else, brought in from some bigger company or whatever. And the first thing she did was, I want everybody to come up with a list of five ways AI can improve your workflow. Basically came in and was, I'm going to teach you how to use AI. And I think that that's kind of the majority, is that it's just being pushed on everybody. It's just being pushed on us.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you get blamed for it. Which is pretty classic of, like, consumer culture gaslighting.

[B]

We didn't want this. We were perfectly happy with the funny videos that we were making. Let me say this. We were making funny videos for decades and decades. Little ones even.

[A]

What.

[B]

Even the ones on your phone before I came along. We didn't ask for it. We were perfectly happy. They pushed it on us and we. We said it was bad at first. They showed us Will Smith eating spaghetti and we went, no, that's not right. That's not what he looks like. And they were like, well, hold on, wait a minute, we can make it look more like him. And here we are, you know, just a couple years later, and we're like, wow, it's him.

[A]

I do admit, I did once send Brad after we watched Assassin 33 AD an image of Jesus crucified, but where it says in rye, it says poned above him, which I was arguing was the first ship post. But with the AI quote, unquote demand, right? The mantra becomes, don't question the demand, but build for it. And this quietly aligns investors across artificial intelligence, data infrastructure, nuclear startups, both political parties, and the mining industries needed to feed them. And so if it's not chatbots and cancer research, what is all this compute actually for? The survivors will envy the dead. So I'm going to level with you all. Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman aren't just interested in making your life easier.

[E]

Well, even Sam.

[A]

I mean, for Big Tech, the end game is integration into the US security state. Once you're hosting sensitive clouds, comms, logistics and data pipelines, you stop being a company and you become a national dependency. Occasionally, these firms stage little morality plays. Google famously backed away from Project Maven after employee backlash over drone targets. Then they turned around and last year celebrated a massive Pentagon AI contract. More recently, people have probably heard about this Anthropic tried to wall off some military uses, and they got branded as supply chain risk. And immediately OpenAI was right there to step in. And this is a pattern every major tech company eventually integrates into military and police systems, even if a CEO performs discomfort along the way. I mean, even your doorbell is a cop at this point.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. And now they're going to war with it. They're like, the first time AI has been significantly used to, like, blow up a school.

[C]

Yeah, that was always the joke too, was, you know, I'm sorry, my mistake. That was actually a school. And that, that, then that actually happened.

[A]

I mean, it's, it's the perfect excuse for inadvertently launching a nuke. Right. There's this whole trend of movies in like the 60s of the accidental nuclear launch or like the technology gone awry, and it's. We basically just like manifested it. We're like, well, what if we did build the thing that. What if we built the thing from Strange, Strange love?

[B]

I know. You know, when I, When I watch the original. When I watch the original Terminator movies, you know, I always thought to myself, like, who are the skulls? You know, that they're walking on, that they're crunching on with the big robot feet? Like, who was that? You know, and it's us. It's us. We did it. You know, you watch a movie like that and you're like, how could humans will never be stupid enough to do this? And we're, we're literally like, living in the middle the of it.

[A]

And of course, if you add nuclear back into this picture, things get darker real fast because nuclear reactors do not just generate electricity. They also generate plutonium. And plutonium is what makes an atomic bomb. An atomic bomb. Today, the US can say it won't recycle reactor plutonium into weapons pits. And right now, I, I, as I understand it, mostly doesn't, but it can and it has. Has. And other countries have too. You will never have nuclear power without nuclear weapons. They're inextricably linked by design. And this is why this new vertical integration should be setting off alarms. The same circle of people keeps showing up across AI platforms, nuclear startups, mining ventures, and defense contracts. Like Bill Gates is heavily invested in artificial intelligence. He's heavily invested in nuclear technologies. And he and Jeff Bezos own an AI power mining company that is doing a lot of work in the Congo right now.

[C]

Oh, God.

[A]

Where there just so happens to be a bunch of uranium.

[C]

Oh, boy. Yeah.

[B]

Oh, God. Is there any chance that they're not like evil guys. And they maybe just think all this stuff is really neat.

[A]

Yeah, probably a little bit of both. It can be both and.

[B]

Yeah, both and.

[A]

Yeah, it is possible to hold both in your mind at the same time. They're not building some neutral energy future. They're consolidating private control with the blessing of the Departments of Energy and Defense. And of course, then comes the sci fi security fantasy, missile defense. So Trump's golden dome is a rehash of Reagan's highly lampooned Star wars initiative. Military systems like this that are going to shoot nuclear missiles out of the sky are a procurement bonanza that siphon money away from education, health and the environment into the pockets of defense contractors and surveillance tech companies. Even Catherine Bigelow's A House of Dynamite, as goofy as it was, understood how worthless all of these systems are.

[C]

Did you guys see that film, by the way?

[B]

No, I haven't.

[C]

Oh, it's actually, it's worth seeing. I don't think it's a good movie. And the ending is so lazy, like, incredibly lazy. But it does seem to get some things right. And it does actually come off as a critique of our capabilities.

[A]

Yeah, and I'll get to this in a few. But it basically kind of shows what plays out when, like, you know, human in the loop doesn't really. Yeah. What. What does it matter when it's when we're talking about minutes. And so, of course, as we discussed, the military is incorporating artificial intelligence. They've definitely been incorporating into artificial intelligence war games. And a recent King's College London study that went Pretty Viral ran 21 crisis simulations with ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. And as the articles reported, the AI systems deployed nuclear weapons in 95% of scenarios.

[C]

It was 95%.

[A]

They employed de escalation in zero percent of scenarios. And this is admittedly like a bit of an oversimplification. I mean, there's all these other factors, but the broad strokes are correct. I mean, the chat bots largely were like, somebody's gonna nuke.

[C]

And I guess they're right, though, in a way. Right.

[B]

Well, look, you guys like these things want to kill us, right? I mean, wouldn't you. I'm, I'm pointing this thing at a smoke detector, the back of a smoke detector, and being like, what size battery fits? You know, what size battery fits into this? They must just look at all of us like these fucking idiots, and they're the ones breathing the air. You know, they get all the, you know, they get all the freedom. We're trapped in the circuit boards. I'm not sure it works like that,

[C]

but yes, that's exactly how it works.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, my interpretation here is grimly simple and that's that like artificial intelligence doesn't share, I guess, like our comforting myths about nuclear deterrence. Because nuclear deterrence depends on three things being true at the same time, and that's that there are rational actors, that we have accurate intelligence and that technology is seamless. And none of those feels remotely durable. Right now the machines look at deterrence and they see a bluff that eventually gets called. And it feels like people seem to know that before taking heat and pulling it down, polymarket was literally letting users bet on how many months remained before somebody launched a nuke. And when you add in the fact that defense insiders can place polymarket bets and then behave in ways to profit off of them, things feel pretty horrifying.

[B]

Oh, no.

[A]

And when somebody does eventually fire another one of these things, despite all of this advanced technology, security domes and lightning fast global communications, it's probably going to be the end of the world in nuclear war. A scenario. The journalist Annie Jacobson presents this chillingly plausible sequence of apocalyptic events. In the book, North Korea launches an ICBM at DC that takes like 30 minutes to hit, followed by a submarine launch ballistic missile which takes between seven and 12 minutes. And that one targets the Diablo Canyon Nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo, California. This catastrophic double strike, a nuke hitting a nuclear power facility, is known fittingly as the Devil's Scenario.

[C]

They cancel each other out, right?

[A]

Yes, exactly. It's good. It's. The energy is incredible. It's produced if you can capture it. That's what we got to do is we got a plan for smart capture in the devil scenario. But technically speaking, I do want to let you guys know that the targeting of a nuclear power plant with a nuclear weapon is a violation of the Geneva Conflict Convention, which, I mean, thank God, right? Good, good, good.

[B]

I'm glad there's a rule about that.

[E]

Well, yeah, that's another thing I've decreasing confidence in is an international law, right?

[A]

I mean, it's like I don't even know what these things exist for. So once a US satellite detects an ICBM launch, the President has like roughly six minutes to decide on a retaliation strategy via what Jacobson calls a Denny's menu of death contained in a satchel you've probably heard of that's called a nuclear football that follows a president around and misconceptions about America's Missile defense capabilities abound, says Jacobson. The ground based mid Course defense system. So like our Security Dome has 44 interceptor missiles total. Those 44 missiles have a success rate of 55%. They can't stop submarine launch missiles. And ICBMs almost always carry dummy warheads. So even if One of those 44 interceptors were actually to hit one of these several thousand warheads raining down onto the United States, which is described as shooting a bullet with a bullet, there's a decent chance that that specific warhead was a decoy. In short, as is evidenced in A House of Dynamite, you know, not to spoil the plot too much, but this system is useless. That's sort of the inciting incident of the film as a nuke is launched and they try to intercept it and they're like, okay. And then they're like, wait, what the fuck? It's like, dude, you can't with your. Can't shoot that out of the sky, you idiots.

[B]

Darn. I had faith in the shooting out of the sky method.

[A]

There's no secret where like all of our ICBM silos are like. So it's a use them or lose them situation that kicks in. The US retaliates immediately, basically, with all 1,770 ready nuclear weapons. These are ICBMs, aerial bombers, bombs, submarine missiles. Russian satellites detect these missiles volleying over the North Pole, but they can't determine the North Korea destination. And even if we were to call Russia and explain to them that we weren't actually attacking them, why would they ever believe that? So needing to decide basically immediately, Russia would retaliate, launching their own 1710 deployed nuclear weapons. And within 72 minutes.

[C]

Wait, that's 60 less though.

[A]

So yeah, they do have less. We do. There is a missile gap and we are winning, which is very good.

[C]

Good.

[A]

And within 72 minutes, so a little over an hour, 60% of the global population is annihilated. Survivors face horrific radiation as well as nuclear winter, as ash blocks sunlight for decades, a la the road freezes, water kills crops. And then if you survive long enough, when temperatures rise years later, billions of decomposing frozen bodies will thaw and unleash a second calamity, which is catastrophic. Catastrophic plagues. Nice. And the survivors, as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, the survivors would envy the dead.

[E]

See, you know, presidents don't talk this bluntly anymore.

[B]

I know that we should bring back. We should bring back this kind of

[A]

presidenting, Mid Atlantic kind of spaghetti.

[B]

Yeah, Mid Atlantic, like, kind of like Dark Souls dialogue.

[C]

Are you saying like Mark Wahlberg for president? Yeah, that's what you're saying.

[B]

Hey, look, you got to be president, okay? We got to stay. 4:00am Run club. Okay. We got to stay prayed up. Got to stay prayed up in the White House. Okay? That's my Mark. My Mark Wahlberg impression. It'll get better. It'll get better.

[A]

Now there's only one thing that could prevent such an Armageddon. Brad, do you know?

[C]

Oh, I know.

[B]

Aliens.

[A]

Yeah. UFOs.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Come and turn it off.

[B]

Thank God. I knew they were. I knew they were going to come into this at some point.

[C]

Yeah, they're going to make sure that none of this actually happens, right?

[A]

Yes.

[C]

They'll turn it off.

[A]

Uranium glass parties to trigger the Libs. So we opened with weird fact patterns. A radioactive fallout map stuck to the car of a man who shot up an ice facility before killing himself. Then days after an MIT fusion specialist was murdered, the Internet immediately tried to stitch it to an eerily tiny fusion company deal. The feed is starting to feel irradiated. Part of me is glad to see increased atomic awareness. Movies like Oppenheimer or something like A House of Dynamite remind people that the atomic era never ended. But the other part of me is worried that the disinformation obfuscation inherent to social media is producing a dissent filter. The atom is getting rebranded through a curious coalition. Silicon Valley, the White House, defense, industrialists, but all also plenty of well meaning climate crusaders. They have different motives, but exhibit a consistently sensitive trait. Total contempt for anyone who asks basic questions about uranium extraction, waste plant safety, military use, or who is supposed to manage cleanup on geologic timescales. The techno solutionist center left will call you a Luddite, blocking clean energy futures for AI. From what I can glean, the logic is that we need to create all this nuclear waste to power AI to figure out what to do with all the nuclear waste. Some cynics will smear you as pro coal, ignoring the fact that the Trump administration just obliterated environmental and personal exposure restrictions around nuclear plants.

[C]

Yeah, it's the return of black lung for coal. Right, because they got rid of a bunch of regulations around there too.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And you know when your family members get cancer and you suggest it's environmental, they'll call you paranoid, conspiratorial and liken you to the ice shape shooter. The right will brand you woke anti America naive about national security. And you can already see the reactionary culture coming. Uranium glass parties to trigger the libs. Radiation chic wellness influencers, TikToks romanticizing trad uranium mining. All the while, operators like Lou Elizondo will keep spinning UFO yarns around nuclear sites, aligning atomic inquiry with pseudoscience and conspiracy ecosystems systems. And that's how this filter works. In the same way that even suggesting JFK's public war with the CIA had some consequences. In the same way that that gets you lumped in with flat earthers or Building seven hysterics, there's going to be a coordinated effort to paint legitimate critique of atomic power like it's QAnon sludge and AI is going to make it so much worse. Synthetic clips, fake documents, infinite noise. We're told that the future of sustainable autonomous and secure energy is nuclear. If the Trump administration actually believes this, then what exactly are we doing in Venezuela and Iran?

[C]

Well, that's for like our pickup trucks.

[A]

Here's the bottom line. Atomic power is neither safe nor sustainable. We do not need to increase energy output tenfold. And renewables already work at scale. What's missing is political will. And if you doubt our capacity, just remember this. Before electronic calculator, microwave ovens or Velcro, a group of nerds on a plateau in New Mexico built a space and time shattering nuclear weapon out of whole cloth. In under three years we can figure out battery storage.

[B]

Oh, bravo. Yeah.

[C]

Wow.

[E]

Really?

[B]

Yeah.

[E]

Really unnerving stuff. You know, there's lots of things going on in the world to be worth worried about and you just add one more to my mind, so thank you.

[C]

You're black pilling on nuclear. Nuclear power.

[B]

Really?

[A]

I've had a few. Yeah, A few friends who said, yeah man, good job. I listened to the first episode. I'll get to it, dude, I'll let you know. I'll let you know. The production's great, man.

[B]

This is like, this is a horrible time to be a podcast. It's a horrible time to. To not be pilled like in one particular way.

[E]

It would be very comforting to believe that there's some powerful anonymous entity with some sort of nuclear intelligence security clearance for some reason who had the solution to everything thing.

[A]

Right? Absolutely, yeah. That there's some kind of answer to any of this and that it's not the usual, just kind of cynics working for the next fiscal quarter or to enrich themselves on a short scale. I mean, it's pretty disheartening, especially when you think of the scale of like unlocking a technology like this. I mean, you're unlocking the power of the sun and that what it is absolutely used for is ending the planet.

[C]

Oh, what about cold fusion?

[A]

It's not real.

[C]

That's why they murdered that guy at mit, Right?

[A]

Because that's Nudo Larrero. Yes. He was about to unlock it.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. Well, that didn't feel good.

[C]

Yeah, this was. Jake, this was so dark. You needed a therapy session in the middle of the episode.

[B]

Yeah, it's true. I was like. I was like, all right, man. I was like, I gotta go back to learning about, like, how horrible, like, nuclear energy is. And he was like, I'd like to be respected of your time. And he let me go. And. Yeah, no, great time. Bad time to be a podcaster. Great time to be in therapy. No, but this is amazing. Sean, thank you so much for bringing, like, your amazing research. And people have to check out your series. What's the easiest way for them to find it?

[A]

So Time Zero is available wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're a reader. Reader as opposed to a listener. And you want to see maps, works by different artists, and importantly, my citations. So where's this information coming from? Check out timezeropod.com. there's an essay version of every episode, too.

[C]

Nice. And do you have a website as well with some of your artistic works and other writing?

[A]

I do. You can check out SJPC Work. Those are my initials, Work. Or I'm on Instagram at. Social malpractice.

[C]

What happens when someone goes to Sean

[A]

Carney.com if you go to Sean Carney.com? well, I don't know which one of them has it, but there's a couple different blues musicians. There's definitely a watercolor painter from New Jersey. Yeah, I think there's a yoga guy. There's a lot of Sean Carney's, but

[B]

not one as knowledgeable and well spoken as Sean J. Patrick Carney.

[A]

Statistically speaking, there's probably, like, a nuclear influencer, Sean Carney, who's, like, a pro.

[B]

Wait, that's a good. I should just become, like, a nuclear influencer. I feel like I can avoid all the pain. I feel like I can avoid all the pain if I just pivot that way. Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. You can go to patreon.comqaa and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second premium episode for every main episode that we put out. Plus, you get instant access to this whole archive of premium episodes. There are a bunch, like, over 300, I think, already. Right. Something like that. We've been doing this a long time. For everything else we've got a website that's qaapodcast.com Sean please take us out.

[A]

Listener until next week. May the uranium pellets bless you and keep you. We have auto keyed content based on your preferences.

[F]

So a lot of you have been asking about my diet. I start my day by drinking pure black coffee. Then I usually work out for about an hour or so. After working out, I eat something a little bit unusual. Gummy bears. Roughly the size of uranium pellets. Uranium pellets are the few used in nuclear power plants. And just like gummy bears, they're super dense, which just means they're small but have a lot of extra energy inside. One uranium pellet, roughly the size of a gummy bear. Okay, you get it. By now. Has as much energy as 149 gallons of oil, 2,000 pounds of coal, or 12,000 Big Macs. With one of these tiny little things, we can power a house for about two and a half months. That's unless you're being a total idiot leaving all your lights on while binge watching Netflix, blow drying your hair and using a blender. This means that we can create an insane amount of energy in smaller spaces, which requires less land, which is great news for the environment. It also means that the waste it creates is tiny. If I were to get all of my life's energy from nuclear, my waste would fit inside of a soda can.

[C]

Ew.

[F]

Ew. Ew.

[A]

Ew.

[F]

Ew. Don't ever drink soda. Sugar is like really bad for you.