Thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring this episode. This was humanity's first introduction to nuclear power, the atomic bomb. And this is a nuclear power plant, which you may know from all the time that they've broken down in history and scared the crap out of people hello HBO's Chernobyl. But you've actually been lied to about nuclear energy. And in order to understand those lies, we first have to talk about where the energy comes from. In 1938, scientists discovered nuclear vision. They did this by slamming an atom of uranium with a neutron. It would divide into two and release a large amount of energy. Not only this, but during the nuclear vision reaction up to three neutrons are ejected, which can trigger further vision reactions of more atoms, meaning more energies released. This is known as a chain reaction. During World War II, America would use the same technology to create the first atomic bomb, but it wasn't until 1955 that the same scientific principles were used to create the first nuclear power plant that generated electricity. In the 1970s, psychologists started to map people's anxieties about nuclear destruction and the past Cold War onto nuclear power plants, which were now cropping up around the world. Then came the 1979 thriller The China Syndrome, a movie about a fictional nuclear reactor meltdown, which was released on March 6th, 1979, and just 22 days later, a real partial nuclear reactor meltdown happened at three mile island. Talk about free advertisement for your movie. The coincidence of a Hollywood film and this cultural nuclear reactor breakdown coming together really shot into the mainstream this negative connotation with nuclear energy. From the release of this movie to 1988, 67 planned nuclear power plants were canceled. In 1986, Chernobyl happened, which was caused by human error as the temperature of the reactor core became too high and an explosion created a nuclear cloud across Europe. I scream cried while watching Chernobyl. I remember thinking to myself, okay, is nuclear energy a truly invisible horror. Right after that in 1989, we got the Simpsons, where we see people diving into nuclear waste and our favorite, 88 Homer, who we all picture as a safety inspector at a nuclear reactor, as recent as 2011, we have the Fukushima nuclear disaster. And all of this combines made it really hard to not be afraid of nuclear energy. But when you look more into it, you find that. No one died at three mile island and most epidemiological studies found that it had no detectable health consequences. After 30 years, only 51 people died from the incident at Chernobyl and scientific studies found few health risks connected to radiation exposure after Fukushima. Take this recent in a nutshell video linked in the description. It shows how using coal, oil, natural gas and biomass has killed 100 million people in the past 50 years. This was due to pollution created by the byproducts of burning fossil fuels. The world's health organization explains that it's safer to work in a nuclear power plant than in a big city office. As the urban air pollution of ozone, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen dioxide causes 7 million deaths annually. Only 0.005% of the average Americans yearly radiation dose comes from nuclear power. This is 200 times less than a cross country flight. 100 times less than what we get from coal and about the same as eating one banana per year. Wait, so if I'm scared of nuclear energy, I also have to be scared of a banana, but like peanut butter and bananas on toast is my culture. Also, being a hate-holding banana, I was like, I guess I just reminds we were getting bullied. There's also this study showing that a CT scan of the abdomen involves about 10 times the radiation exposure that the average nuclear worker gets in a year. Or that living in a big polluted city increases your mortality risk by 2.8 times that of a Chernobyl cleanup worker. So what is happening is nuclear energy dangerous or safe? But just before we get to that, we want to thank today's sponsor Skillshare. The first 1000 people to use the link in our description get a free trial of Skillshare premium membership. So go check it out because it goes fast. Skillshare's actually how I improved my own animation skills to animate this channel with Greg Strang's. I also taught myself Photoshop using Skillshare, and it's just an amazing way to continue to learn and grow your brain. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes for curious and creative people. You can explore new skills or deep-encurrent passions, like this course that I took for beginner veritors where it actually taught me to correctly identify morning dubs. It was so exciting. It turns out that the wings make a specific type of calories. Eugh! I'm obsessed with burning. Or this class about electricity generation where you can take a deep dive into solar, wind, and nuclear energy, and actually understand the physics and mechanics of generating this electricity. This was integral for me making this video. It's curated specifically for learning, meaning that there are no ads, and there are always launching new premium classes at the cost of $10 a month within annual subscription, which is amazing. So you can help our show by clicking the link in the description and the first 1000 people will get a free trial of premium membership. This genuinely is how you guys can support us here at ASAP Science. Now let's get back to the core of this video about the nuclear reactors core. These reactors use low and rich uranium, and control chain reactions to heat, pressurized water, which in turn, heats other water in a secondary circuit that causes steam to rotate a turbine, which is linked to a generator that creates electricity. Cool water from a river or ocean can be pumped in to cool the water in the secondary circuit, or sometimes cooling towers are built. Like these iconic bad boys that we all know and love from the Simpsons. Current research has found that American opinions haven't changed much on nuclear energy since the Cold War, which is weird because it feels like culture has shifted. Kids no longer learn to hide under their desk Simproporation for nuclear war, now they learn to hide under their desks for preparation of a mass shooter. In fact, 54% of Americans still oppose nuclear energy today. So let's talk nuclear power plant safety. A Harvard study found that newer generations of nuclear reactors, particularly what is called pebble bed reactors, are designed so that the nuclear chain reaction cannot run away and cause meltdown, even in the event of a complete failure of the reactors machinery. And that with the advent of modern reactors such as the pebble bed reactor and careful selection of plant sites, nuclear accidents like the one in Fukushima are actually not possible. But some people think that emphasizing safety actually just emphasizes fear. Airlines don't advertise how safe they are because then you would just be thinking about crashing the whole time you're on the plane and the fact that you need to look next to the stranger beside you and be like, I don't know, I love you, I'm sorry, goodbye. While you're screaming and the plane's shaking and you have to cover your head and apparently you're like, break on impact. So maybe nuclear energy should use the airlines approach and stop explaining why they're safe and start unapologetically explaining how great they are. Nuclear reactors such as Diablo Canyon, which will be closed in 2024 due to cost upkeep, accounts for roughly 9% of California's energy but occupies fewer than 600 acres. Honestly, that's a wauzer to think of that much energy coming out of that little Diablo Canyon. They are currently 56 nuclear power plants operating in the US that provide the country with roughly 20% of the electrical supply. That's more than half of the US's low carbon electricity. The NASA Goddard Institute predicts that. Nuclear power has prevented 1.84 million deaths that would have occurred if the energy was produced by fossil fuels. This is 370 times more life saved than have been lost to any nuclear power plant issues in the last 40 years. At this point, I feel very lied to, but what about the nuclear waste? 97% of the waste created by nuclear plants is classified as low or intermediate level waste. All the nuclear waste in the US is often compared to the size of a football field piled 50 feet high. The World Nuclear Association describes that the waste is encapsulated in a highly engineered casks in stable, vitrified form, and is emplaced at depths to well below the biosphere. Such long-term geological storage solutions are designed to prevent any movement of radioactivity for thousands of years. So even in the event of an earthquake or natural disaster, these repositories will keep the waste from reaching the surface and releasing radiation. In addition, 96% of this waste can be recycled to make new fuel and bi-products. So the nuclear power industry puts their waste in monitored, concrete casks deep into the ground, but the coal, oil and natural gas industries release their waste into the atmosphere, where it causes pollution and kills thousands of people a year and like all the birds. And these greenhouse gases contribute to the six largest mass extinction that we are currently in. And to the climate crisis that we are currently in. So is it safe? Well, nuclear energy is definitely safer than the fossil fuels that we are addicted to right now. The fear of nuclear energy is getting in the way of us having an honest discussion of how it can work with renewable energy to get us to a zero carbon future. As stated, the US gets 20% of its electricity from nuclear power plants, France gets 70% from nuclear. Impressive research at MIT analyzed 1,000 scenarios of getting to our zero carbon future and all the cheapest paths involved nuclear, helping renewable energy get to where it needs to be. Focusing in on America, there is a scenario where you can get to a zero carbon future with just renewables and leaving the existing nuclear power plants on. But this is specific to America because America is rich in renewable energy opportunities. It's got the windy Texas, the super sunny California. Many other parts of the world do not have the ability to rely on renewable energy in this way. It's for this reason that the UK has put nuclear a front and center for how it's going to get to zero carbon emissions because they can't really rely on solar and wind in the same way. China is also currently building nuclear reactors due to their increasing consumption of energy. Now, up to this point, we've ignored a really important part of this conversation, the economics. I explained really well in this real engineering video, linking the description, nuclear power plants are extremely expensive to create. Since 1996, only one nuclear power plant has been made in the US and likely due to the cost, not fear. Take the crappy scenario in South Carolina where a $9 billion nuclear plant wasn't finished and now the people of South Carolina are paying for it even though it's releasing no energy. But innovation in the nuclear power space could make reactors that are smaller and much more cost-effective. We all know that we need to scale up renewable energy. And there have been amazing strides made across the Earth, but we can't allow our irrational fear of nuclear energy to stop its ability to innovate. A great start would be to look at the climate platform drafted by John Kerry and AOC, which included a plan to create cost-effective pathways for developing innovative reactors. The biggest lie about nuclear energy is the way it's been depicted towards us in culture, whether it's from the Simpsons, which honestly made me so small. Honestly, it's a carrot about nuclear energy. That lie is real. I feel like I have was so scared about nuclear energy until I started to do all this research about the climate crisis and realize that we probably need it. I think the biggest takeaway from this is that we need to stop the in-fighting. We're all against the fossil fuel industry. We want to save this planet and we want to get to net zero carbon emission as a society and it's a great option for us to come together. Whenever we talk about nuclear energy on our channel, the comments are heated. It's like a cold war, okay? People who are pro-nuclear are like, if we don't use nuclear, we're gonna become tree hugging lefties and like, marry a solar panel. And people who are anti-nuclear energy are like, if we use it, we're all gonna die. And I'm just like, okay, we need to stop this in-fighting because we need to be talking about the dangerous fossil fuels that we know and are currently killing all of us. So where do we go from here? We want your help with this. This is not a simple answer. So please in the comments, let us know what you think. Have you been scared of nuclear energy? Is nuclear energy something that you believe in? Something that you're against? We will be there and we will be responding to you. And maybe we'll be talking about the new nuclear fusion reactor as well, which is so cool. So check out the links in the description and we'll see you there. Thank you so much for watching and we will see you next week for a new science video. Or maybe a climate change video. Peace. See you.