Green Abundance: Alex Trembath of The Breakthrough Institute on Radio Abundance

Transcript

0:00 Welcome to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. It's time to build again, folks. Fascism never made America great, but when progressives build, that's where you'll find American greatness. Tonight's guest is Alex Trembath, deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute. They've been in the abundance game before abundance had a name. For two decades, the Breakthrough Institute has fought to build clean energy, protect the environment, save the climate and improve food and farming. Not with scarcity and saying no, but with abundance, creation and saying yes. We'll talk about their origins in 2005, what makes nuclear energy powerful and safe, how to think about the Fukushima disaster and the upcoming Abundance 2025 conference this September in Washington, D.C. That's coming up right now on Radio Abundance.

0:51 You're listening to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. Now let's get to the show. Joining YIMBY Democrats for America, Executive Director Steve Boyle. And to kick things off, here's Steve. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I hate these guys. All right, we are here with Alex Trembath. He is the deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute. Alex, welcome to Radio Abundance. Pleasure to be here, Steve. Hey, it is a pleasure to have you and get to sit down with you. You know, we met because the Breakthrough Institute joined us for our big abundance happy hour in San Francisco that was covered in the Wall Street Journal as an incredible coalition event. You know, we had Inclusive Abundance, Abundance Network, YIMBY Action, SF YIMBY, as well as, you know, the San Francisco Democratic Party.

1:42 It was a great opportunity to bring together the full abundance ecosystem, the YIMBY ecosystem, and the democratic ecosystem in San Francisco. And something that we are keen to note is that abundance is more than housing. Housing is sacred to us and very top of mind and very important. We are urbanists. We like cities. And we want to reduce the cost of living for everybody, give everybody opportunities to have a roof over their head and to thrive and build the life they want. And a big part of that is a lot of other areas that need abundance, too, from transportation to health care and, of course, energy, clean energy, the climate, the planet, food and agriculture and food security and health and nutrition. And so we were so honored and delighted to have the Breakthrough Institute there with us, bringing people together, helping to to bolster that event and turn out their coalition and bring these worlds together.

2:33 And we're really excited for this opportunity right now to sit down with you, Alex, and deep dive into into what the Breakthrough Institute is. What do you care about and and what we should be thinking and learning about these questions around everything from food and agriculture to to energy, the cost of energy, clean energy, climate change and the planet. So thank you for being with us. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I you know, I like to think that, you know, the the abundance movement is the is the kind of, you know, a massive river into which flow several sort of either recently or more long lasting sort of tributaries. So I like to think that, you know, we at the Breakthrough Institute and a bunch of these other sort of constituent organizations in the abundance coalition have been doing abundance since sort of long before abundance was the was the watchword.

3:23 Or even a book or conference or any of these things, which is, you know, like it's kind of funny, actually, contrary to to an argument that you see some abundance critics making, which is that it's the sort of top down AstroTurf coordinated project of whatever the neoliberals or the tech riot or Silicon Valley, whatever. It's just not that at all. It's actually it's emergent, right? It's emergent from a number of sort of strands of thought and scholarship and activism that have kind of cropped up over the last few years, including some sort of newer sort of policy think tanks that have emerged and been founded since covid, like the Institute for Progress, Foundation for American Innovation, Employee America. But then also, you know, somewhat older kind of strands like the YIVI movement, which has been around for over a decade at this point, sort of has an epicenter in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is and that is pretty coincidentally, at least in terms of the logistics, coincidentally, where the Breakthrough Institute was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area.

4:21 Our first office in Oakland, where we're in Berkeley right now, we were founded in 2008 to kind of revitalize environmentalism for the 21st century. Our sort of founding sort of policy mantra and ambition was to make clean energy cheap, which was an alternative, which was the foundation of an alternative politics for addressing climate change, an alternative to kind of capping and regulating carbon emissions away to a politics of clean energy abundance. So we've been talking in so many terms and words about a politics of abundance for almost 20 years now, and I'm sure we'll get into the various chapters of the Breakthrough Institute's history. But that has woven from, you know, the pre and early Obama years has woven from when wind, solar and batteries were way more expensive through conversations about old nuclear and new nuclear, the founding of the eco-modernist movement, which launched it, which launched here in California from the Breakthrough Institute, all the way to this conversation that we're having about abundance and the sort of growing strength of the abundance coalition.

5:23 So there's always a lot to get into there, but that's at a high level, sort of how I and the Breakthrough Institute got involved in these conversations about abundance. Yeah, you know, you can be Democrats for America has been around three months, I think the Breakthrough Institute about 17 years and we're, you know, we're all about, well, honoring is one part of it, but, you know, revering and and learning from and working with all the forerunners that have built this movement and and had the courage and the sort of spirit of innovation and political bravery to show up at a time when people weren't making these arguments. And build them from a small place to to now a big place. And that includes everything from, you know, we've had on Yimby Democrats of San Diego, who, as far as we know, are the first and only really Yimby Democratic group before Yimby Democrats for America and that we get to be the first national group.

6:21 They're amazing. And I think they began around 2018. You mentioned the Yimby movement in San Francisco. I really think about that as starting with, you know, kind of Sonia Trouse around like 2014. Obviously, there was, you know, people wanting to build more housing and deregulate some housing before then. But like the the movement and the organization and the name Yimby, I think at least comes from there. And that's 2014. You're talking 2008. So that's six years before that. So this goes back a long ways. What was and I know you I think you joined a little later, but but what was what's the inception of this? I mean, what did the world look like pre Breakthrough Institute and and how did it come to pass that that this got started in the first place? So, yeah, the two founders of the Breakthrough Institute published an essay in 2005.

7:09 So in the prehistory of even the Breakthrough Institute, that essay was called The Death of Environmentalism. It was an intentionally sort of provocative title, which described the ways in which the environmentalism that had emerged in the sort of postwar decades in the United States, in the in the 60s and 70s especially, was really outmoded to the environmental challenges of the 21st century. So it's not exactly certainly that we had like solved the classic 20th century environmental problems, pollution, land use change, biodiversity loss, deforestation. These remain problems, both sort of globally and locally around the world. But it was that the types of politics and the types of solutions offered by the environmental movement were were at least insufficient to the challenge of like decarbonizing 15 terawatts of global energy production.

8:05 We're at least insufficient to the challenge of feeding at the top five, going on six, seven, eight, nine, 10 billion people without sort of paving over the rest of the world's rainforest and without accelerating climate change. And they were and those solutions were insufficient because environmentalism was fundamentally a movement about stopping things and about sort of techno skepticism at best, if not sort of active sort of sort of opposition to to technological solutions at its worst. And so, you know, it's hard to sort of condensed the ideas of the death of environmentalism that the founding of the Breakthrough Institute to eco modernism to now the sort of abundance chapter into into one answer, let alone let alone one podcast.

8:51 But more or less sort of eco modernists are people who care about the environment, who think that the that nature has sort of an intrinsic existence value that we want to protect as much as we can, but also believe that technology can help solve not just cause environmental problems. So so so yes, like industrialization and fossil fuels cause land use change and cause deforestation and and release carbon emissions in the atmosphere. But, you know, but they also uplifted human societies and lifted humans out of poverty. So there's at least a trade off there in in the relationship between humans, technology and nature. And increasingly, we have technologies available to us more and more that minimize environmental damage as opposed to as opposed to merely sort of mediating it or or causing it.

9:43 So you can actually you can actually get more energy in the future out of things like nuclear power plants and solar panels than you could sort of practically out of coal, oil and gas. So if we can sort of get the technology and engineering right, that way you have energy abundance without things like climate change and while minima actually minimizing the sort of materials and land use of our energy footprint. And so there's a whole bunch of examples of ways in which technology can can help accomplish that. So that's that's that's that's the sort of founding idea of the Breakthrough Institute, that that the old environmentalism wasn't serving us. And in the in the sort of early years of of Breakthrough, we started to kind of construct a sort of a successor to environmentalism that we think would serve us.

10:34 That that ultimately gives way to the publication of an eco modernist manifesto in 2015 and again, ultimately gives way to the sort of what I would describe as kind of hyper compatible, if not sort of identical sort of environmental kind of ambitions of between eco modernism and the broader abundance movement. But those are some of the core ideas of both of the founding and the evolution of Breakthrough.

11:03 Yeah, I mean, it is an amazing and inspiring journey. You've talked about being for abundance before abundance was the buzzword and not just caring about abundance, but being aggressively against scarcity. The idea of an environmentalism for the 21st century is something I think a lot about. What is progressivism for the 21st century? What would a new deal for the 21st century look like? And you've talked about an environmentalism that builds, that creates as opposed to obstructs. You know, we just had Congressman Richie Torres on this podcast, and he talked about a cognitive dissonance at the core of democratic politics, because on the one hand, we talk about climate change as a planetary emergency and an existential threat. And as much as we take Republicans to task for having for decades denied its existence and denied any interest in doing something about it, it is embarrassing and humiliating on the politics, but devastating for the planet that you get to a point where Texas is building far more clean energy than California.

12:08 How can that be possible? How can we get there? So this seems like an urgently needed movement, not just in the political space, but to solve climate change and save the planet. And as you mentioned, not just making the planet hospitable and sustainable, but also just how do you feed everybody and lift everybody up? So I'm curious in a very fast way, if you could sort of take us through the 17 years a little bit, because thinking, all right, so you got this, the sort of the essay and kind of opening salvo in 2005. I mean, that 2005 was a crazy moment, right? This is the heart of the Bush administration. They had just won reelection in spite of the giant failures in Iraq. This is pre surge. So nothing had even started to improve in Iraq. We were at kind of the nadir of like that chaos and death. This is before the 20 2006 midterms.

12:53 So Democrats had not taken back the House. I mean, that was a rough moment for Democrats, for the country and the environmental movement. You mentioned getting started in 2008. So, you know, depending on where that falls, I don't know where that falls in the presidential election and sort of the arc of Barack Obama's rise. You know, and then you've got the Obama years. And and I think you mentioned the eco modernist manifesto coming out around 2015. So that's when you're starting to see the rise of Trump. And before the you know what in the last years of the Obama administration and, you know, Obama, obviously big on climate change. Obviously, he had in the last Democratic National Convention had an amazing moment in his speech where he talked about zoning and permitting reform, which was incredible. But I don't really remember that from his administration. And then you're going through the first Trump administration and then you're going through the Biden years where you both see, you know, the Inflation Reduction Act and the biggest investment in clean energy and clean energy technology of all time.

13:49 And then also you're hamstrung by all the problems we're talking about now in terms of actually building it and getting it done and getting it through a vitocracy and committees and regulations such that the investment doesn't matter if you don't see an ROI because the shovels don't hit the dart. And of course, now we are living in the new era of Trump 2.0 and whatever that means for the country, I'll let you interpret it. So curious if you can run us down those 17 years, not just the Breakthrough Institute's evolution, but sort of how you've plugged into the wider politics, what the biggest issues and challenges and antagonists have been and and kind of what dent you feel like you've made and impact you feel like you've made in the 17 years. I think the best way to describe it is actually to kind of just chart the fairly tectonic shift in kind of environmental climate and clean energy politics, contrasting like 2008 early Obama with the Biden administration.

14:41 So in 2008, you have just a sort of locked consensus in the environmental coalition that that climate change needed to be the priority issue for the incoming Obama administration and that the policy proposal that had to pass at the time, the sort of super majorities that Democrats had amassed in Congress was was a cap and trade program for carbon emissions. So we were going to put a legal cap on the amount of carbon that industry was legally allowed to emit, and then they would get allowances and they could trade and that and this would produce a price on carbon. We argued that it didn't really matter where you put that cap if you didn't have the low carbon technologies to replace the fossil fuel power plants and cars and factories.

15:36 And what was needed, not instead of, but much more than a price on carbon was sort of a radical investments in low carbon technology and infrastructure to bring down the cost of renewables, to build more transmission, to bring down the cost of electric vehicles. And we were described as climate deniers for voicing any kind of skepticism of of a price on carbon to deliver sort of deep decarbonization. Of course, we all know what happened at that point. The Obama administration, first of all, packages tens of billions of dollars, really hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the clean, the clean energy economy and at Recovery Act in the first few months of 2009. And then, you know, somewhat controversially, it's hard to remember, chooses to prioritize health care over climate change.

16:25 And the infamous climate change bill, the Waxman-Market legislation passed the House but dies in the Senate in 2010.

16:36 And sort of environmentalists in the climate movement have to walk up with their tail between their legs and explain why really hundreds of millions of donations to the environmental movement that had been in support of the cap and trade program had all been for naught. Obviously, there's a whole decade in between the failure of Waxman-Market and the Biden administration. And there's a lot of history that we could fill in there. But the main shift that happens is that our alternative to a sort of carbon price focused climate politics wins. And the Biden administration says climate change is our priority and we're going to address it through massive historic investments in clean energy technology that ultimately manifest in the Infrastructure Innovation and Jobs Act and in the Inflation Reduction Act most especially.

17:29 And, you know, we could quibble about a bunch of details in the policy itself. But as Rebecca Tujus-Dubro, who just wrote this great history of the pro-nuclear movement, I'm sure we'll get a nuclear, just wrote, you know, the Inflation Reduction Act is really the manifestation of make clean energy cheap, of the sort of fast, clean and cheap paradigm that the Breakthrough Institute was really the first to sort of enunciate with the sort of broader Apollo Alliance and clean energy innovation coalition in 2006, 7, 8, and 9. And so that's the sort of change in clean energy and climate politics that we've seen over that arc that you're kind of poking on there, Steve. And I think a part of the reason that it transpired like that is because this sort of clean energy consensus really grew and evolved over time.

18:22 But there was also sort of proof positive of its potential. You know, the cost of solar panels dropped by like a factor of 20 in the last couple of decades, cost of wind by a factor of 5 or 7, cost of batteries by a factor of like 30. We've actually seen a few case studies at this point, just in the last generation, of what it means to make clean energy cheap. And we at Breakthrough think that it is not nearly enough. We need more technologies. We need more progress. But that's really what happened over the last decade is we've just seen sort of a radical reorganization of the of the politics of climate change and a radical reorientation of our of sort of our societal and environmentalist attitudes towards technology. So I'll pause there because there's more we could get into in terms of the nuclear piece of it, which is something we're known for.

19:09 And so the eco-modernist movement and school of thought. But that's really the big sort of overarching change that we've not only seen, but I think it's fair to say it kind of helped effectuate over the last, you know, 15 years. Well, you've teed us up perfectly. Let's talk about clean energy now and we will get to nuclear in a second. But I want to start with the with with solar, wind and batteries. As you mentioned, I mean, this green technology is winning right now and it's winning in in some sense in the best way possible, which is not through kind of prohibition. And and while it's it has been significantly boosted by by subsidies that I mean, it is winning in a market way right now, as you said, the cost for all of those technologies has plummeted. It's plummeted at the same time their effectiveness has grown and is growing.

19:57 I want to give you a moment to just tell our audience just how effective they are right now, just how cheap they are and where you think it's going. But I want to work in another little rub here, which is my my understanding. My impression right now is that if you want to build those technologies, that infrastructure, those actual pieces for things like solar, wind and battery, there is sort of a carbon.

20:20 Carbon tax is the wrong word, but there is a there's a little sacrifice, an upfront sacrifice, I think, which is to say that, like my understanding is that at this moment, you still need a certain amount of dirtier energy in order to build the clean energy infrastructure. That will then, you know, allow us to transcend that dirty energy and use it less and less till we're barely using it at all and actually save the planet through that clean energy infrastructure. So I'm curious, both of you can gauge for us, like, where does solar, wind and battery stand right now in terms of effectiveness and cost where they're going, but also how you think about tradeoffs and how they're actually produced. And by all means, fact check me. But what is the role of dirty energy in in in saving the planet today? Yeah, I'll take that in chunks. And, you know, solar and wind are in their own kind of category, batteries, both grid and kind of consumer scale or a category and then the sort of emissions embedded in into the upstream production that you're talking about there, Steve, is another.

21:18 So I'll take those maybe one at a time. You know, like I said, and like you said, solar and wind have just become massively cheaper in the last 20 years. You know, solar and wind obviously have zero fuel costs, extremely low operating costs. But the whole idea, right, you just stick a panel or a turbine where there's resource and it generates electricity when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. That's a problem if the capital costs are super high, which they were for decades. But those costs have come down radically, mostly with just economies of scale, scope and learning taking place over the last few decades. You know, it's, you know, the sort of open secret contributing to that progress, particularly in the case of solar panels, is China.

22:04 Like it's sort of an important question to ask what the solar revolution or the wind revolution would look like today without the sort of massive industrial productive capacity in China specifically. But the solar panel supply chain has become more diversified over time. And really what you're what you're seeing is sort of engineering and scale gains as we produce more and more silicon photovoltaic panels and wind turbines. To the point now, to your point that, you know, if you look at the interconnection queue, you know, the electric power generation projects in the pipeline to be built, it's mostly solar and wind. And and, you know, that that doesn't mean that all of those projects in the queue are going to be built. But it does mean that there is significant demand for these technologies in a way that, again, if you had if you had asked sort of our interlocutors, you know, 15 years ago, they would have told you that that is insane, that solar and wind were extremely high capital cost technology that were always going to be more expensive than fossil fuels.

23:05 And so you had to put a sort of artificial policy induced price on fossil fuels to to close that parity. And increasingly, we're seeing that fossil fuels are competitive with, you know, combined cycle natural gas on wholesale power markets. And that's why that's why you're seeing it's a big reason why you're seeing more and more solar and wind on the grid. You know, with batteries, batteries increasingly play a really powerful role on the grid as well. If you have more solar and wind, then you are not infrequently, especially in the last few years, generating, you know, more electricity at high noon than than consumers are actually using. But then you're generating no electricity at night because the sun went down. And if you have grid scale storage, you can smooth out that volatility.

23:51 And that's and then this is another example where we've built just massively more batteries and achieve sort of similar economies of scale and learning and sort of market opportunity. Well, and, you know, the great thing about batteries is that they there are really the great thing about all of these technologies that they're so modular, you know, in contrast to something like a large one gigawatt light water nuclear power plant, which is the magical technology, but is not particularly modular in the way that that that a battery that could go either under a grid or into your car or into your garage is. So we just build a lot more of these things and then you get better at building them and they get cheaper. So you see similar progress in lithium ion batteries for cars and you see sort of similar engineering innovations like, you know, like Tesla and Fisker putting the batteries on the chassis of the car as opposed to in the trunk.

24:44 And so it's like on those three, three sort of key technologies when solar batteries, you've just seen a lot of both sort of engineering innovation, but also just scale and cost declines that have sort of increasingly changed the way that we are at least building out the margin of electricity grids today. You know, over 80% of the planet is still powered by fossil fuels, so there's a long way to go. But, you know, increasingly when countries are building energy, they're building wind, solar and batteries. You asked about the, you know, the emissions embedded in sort of industrial productions. You know, like all the sort of solar factories in China are still running on electricity, largely powered by, you know, some of the dirtier coal plants on the planet.

25:34 So that that is important in terms of sort of life cycle emissions analysis.

25:40 But, you know, once you once you do those calculations, and there are hundreds of sort of available in the literature, what you see is you do see a kind of moderate differences in life cycle carbon emissions between solar and wind and nuclear. If I recall correctly, yeah, so wind has a slightly lower life cycle emissions footprint than solar and actually nuclear has the lowest on a per terawatt hour basis, but they're all pretty low compared to coal, oil, natural gas, where the fuel is actually the main contributor to the life cycle footprint. So, you know, there are sort of, you know, non-trivial differences at the time.

26:28 The margin in those sort of upstream emissions and those life cycle emissions, but they're not kind of overwhelming. And I would expect to see sort of continued expansion of all of these low carbon technologies in the coming years and decades and, you know, continued decarbonization of the energy supply as a result.

26:50 Let's indeed talk about nuclear for a second. You know, I think if you if you told people today, especially Democrats, that there was maybe a presidential candidate who was, you know, had a part of their platform to build aggressively public infrastructure that would supply cheap, clean energy across all of America. I think if you told a lot of folks, perhaps not listeners of their podcast, that there had been an American president with a plan on the table to build cheap, abundant green energy for all of America, that people would say, what the heck are you talking about? If you told folks that the people who stopped that were environmentalists and progressives and Democrats on the left. I think that would shock a lot of people.

27:37 And I think it would certainly shock those people if you told them that that president was Richard Milhouse Nixon, who did indeed want to build nuclear plants across the country. This would have done. I mean, I mean, I mean, you can probably quantify better than I can the impact that doing that in the 70s would have had on climate change today to say nothing of energy costs, the cost of living, how much money people have in their pocket. Our foreign affairs and relationships with other nations and dependency and energy exports, exports, rather. So that's a weird bit of history. And and before I ask you all the detractive questions about nuclear power, can you tell us a little bit about both kind of the history of nuclear power and also like today? What is I mean, what is the potential impact of nuclear power and and the cost both to build it and the impact on on energy costs and on the planet?

28:31 Yeah. Richard Nixon wanted to build a thousand nuclear power plants. The United States also signed the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, which which speaks to the difference between then and now, as you're right to point out, Steve.

28:47 And I, you know, I think that's because, you know, despite the ways in which the sort of climate movement and the environmental movement have become intertwined and entangled in so many very real ways, both in terms of their donor base and in terms of their leadership, the environmental movement really starts not exclusively, but largely as an anti-nuclear movement. You have you have you have like, you know, Rachel Carson, who writes Silent Spring, warning about both pesticides and radiation. You have you have the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is founded to oppose the proliferation of both bombs and civilian power plants. You have the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which is for, you know, like nuclear and atomic scientists opposed to nuclear technology.

29:34 You have friends of the Earth and the and the and the and the Sierra Club who kind of kickstart the the modern adversarial legal approach to infrastructure projects by suing to prevent PG&E from building nuclear power plants on California's coast. So, you know, for the politics of the time, you had an environmental movement that was opposed to nuclear and a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who was in favor of it. And that wheel has turned very slowly in the ensuing 50 years. But the the turn of the wheel is really accelerated in the last 10 years or so, I think, you know, largely due to sort of, you know, generational turnover on one hand.

30:23 You know, the sort of millennials and zoomers of today just did not grow up with either the fears of radiation and atomic technologies that boomers sort of sort of came of age under. But also, you know, we're being told by our environmentalist parents that climate change is this existential threat to society. Oh, and by the way, this technology that is generating more zero carbon electricity than anything else in this country. We're going to turn all of that off, too, you know, so to your point about sort of cognitive dissonance, I just think it didn't make very much sense. But, you know, the last thing is that a breakthrough is really at the sort of start. And the center of this is that we now have a kind of civil society, non-industry, pro-nuclear movement in this country and around the world that that honestly, like it starts after Fukushima.

31:19 You know, the Japanese disaster at the Fukushima power plant in 2010. And I think it starts, I know it starts for breakthrough because we felt that while pre-Fukushima, we had been sort of nominally pro-nuclear and excited about these new designs. And of course, it's low carbon technology, so it needs to be part of the story. We hadn't done a whole lot of focused work on it, focused advocacy, focused research. And so for us, and I think for a lot of people, Fukushima was really a Rubicon where it's like, OK, so we've got all these power plants. Japan and Germany want to shut them all off, but we have a climate crisis as well. What do we, like, how do we get through this kind of this kind of dead end here? Like, we have to figure out what we actually think about this technology, about its role in decarbonization and in modern power grids, about its role in kind of environmental politics.

32:14 And where breakthrough comes out on the other side of that is an understanding that is now just sort of widely shared by the UN and the World Health Organization and all of these sort of accrediting scientific bodies that the literal sort of empirical risks of nuclear are real but extremely manageable. It's actually the kind of safest energy technology available today given, or, you know, sort of, you know, across all of civilian nuclear operations in the world, given sort of how well, on average, it's regulated in terms of its operations. It generates power 24-7, 365. It has the lowest environmental and material footprint of any energy technology, which I think some people still don't believe, actually. But, again, it still is a very robust, just empirical finding that if you kind of normalize the literal footprint of the power plants and the mines and the transmission and everything that goes into producing energy in a power plant or in a refinery or whatever, nuclear, you know, like even less so than solar and wind uses the least amount of materials and land.

33:22 So to us, that makes nuclear just kind of the prototypical, what we ultimately call, eco-modernist technology.

33:32 You're decoupling humans' well-being and material consumption from environmental impact. So it doesn't produce carbon emissions or air pollution or water pollution, and it has the lightest environmental and material footprint, which is why nuclear ends up being a really big focus of the Breakthroughs Research and Advocacy Project. We end up sort of becoming very enthusiastic about the sort of next generation of nuclear reactor designs, where you can actually make nuclear a lot more modular, where it starts to look more like a natural gas plant or even like a wind turbine than like a big, hulking mega factory.

34:12 Although there's this sort of role for all of the above in the future. But then you also have this sort of emergent and growing pro-nuclear movement, you know, another one of these sort of tributaries to what we now understand as abundance. You've got like the Save Diablo campaign in California. You've got this coalition of think tanks, Breakthrough, Third Way, Clean Air Task Force, Clear Path, Nuclear Innovation Alliance, Good Energy Collective in Washington, D.C. You have this sort of growing campaigns in Japan, in Germany to not close, but to restart their shuttered nuclear power plants. I think a lot of that is based in sort of concern about climate change, but a lot of it is just based on an increasing understanding of the importance of energy abundance for all sorts of objectives.

34:59 You know, if you have really hyper abundant energy, then you can desalinate water. You can recycle minerals, you can build big cities, you know, you can you can sort of decarbonize while minimizing the land use footprint, which is still sort of, you know, one of the leading challenges with renewables. They take up a lot of land. And so that's, you know, it's a little bit to be said about both, I think, the kind of promise of nuclear and and sort of where the tide has turned on the technology.

35:30 Let's talk a little bit more about Fukushima for a second, right? Because when you tell people about nuclear power and even when they understand the great environmental benefits and the cost benefits, two concerns you hear about a lot, right? One is, is it safe and in accidents? And the other is, how do you store the byproducts? And when you talk about safety, right? I mean, the U.S. nuclear movement was really kind of poisoned and killed for a while because of Three Mile Island. Now you can tell people nobody died at Three Mile Island and has ever died from a nuclear accident in the United States. There were no injuries at Three Mile Island. It is studied and affirmed that there were no environmental impacts, no cancerous impacts, no, no impacts whatsoever on people in the surrounding areas or the country. And then, all right, so you slip from that to talking about Chernobyl and that's a whole thing.

36:19 And we can talk about how that was a long time ago and how the Soviet Union was incompetent. Sure, sure, sure. But the one that's hardest to argue with was was Fukushima. Now, most of the United States is not in a tsunami zone, but I still wonder, you know, when we're thinking about building nuclear power plants, I mean, what happened at Fukushima? What are the risks of something like that in the U.S.? How do we prevent that from becoming a disaster? How do we think about the damage from Fukushima? Yeah, the caveat that I would put at the very top of this is there's really no way to talk about the risks of nuclear power without indulging in a little bit just like very crude, cold mortality statistics, frankly. Because people did die at Chernobyl and people did die at Fukushima, not as a result of sort of release of radiation, but from the fire and from the evacuation.

37:08 And those lives matter. They matter very much.

37:13 But I think you kind of teed it up well there, Steve, in terms of the, you know, what we should take away from each of these really three major nuclear accidents. Three Mile Island released like a minuscule amount of radiation into the atmosphere. No one was harmed in the slightest, you know, by the radiation. There's no containment dome around Chernobyl. And there was a competence issue, as you put it succinctly, as anyone who's watched HBO's Chernobyl could tell you. Fukushima is like, if anything, obviously the kind of most concerning of the of the big three major nuclear incidents over the last few decades, because there was a partial meltdown of the reactor. There was a fire in the reactor building. There were deaths associated with both the flooding and the fire and the and the actual the accident itself and the evacuation of the Fukushima prefecture.

38:07 And but again, there were no deaths associated with release of radiation precisely because, you know, Japan operated on like, you know, Soviet Ukraine, a sort of a modern nuclear power system with redundant engineering capabilities. And with and with and with a containment dome that was, you know, like and with sort of, you know, robust, you know, protective facilities that was, you know, like literally a couple of feet shorter than it should be to prevent flooding. And and and and of course, that sounds like an excuse in many ways it is.

38:50 And there has been, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, at least spent by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to study what happened at Fukushima, both in terms of sort of physical infrastructure and in terms of sort of managerial response. To prevent that kind of that kind of that kind of sort of N plus one disaster from happening to a nuclear power plant in the United States. But it was a frightening sort of industrial accident. And here's where you have to get a little bit cold hearted and crude with the mortality statistic. There's scary industrial accidents all the time. You and I were recording this, I think, a week or so after a Boeing jet went down in India and hundreds of people died. I don't want to say that we should get used to that type of mortality event so that we can build more nuclear power plants.

39:43 In fact, I think that just empirically nuclear power plants are actually a lot safer than air travel, the safest way to travel statistically in the world. And these smaller next generation reactors are even safer because they have fuels and fuel cycles that can't melt down and and and in many cases have reactors and power engineering with fewer with many fewer moving parts and redundant and redundancies. But but but but like I said, Fukushima was a Rubicon precisely because it was a a nuclear disaster that actually had real impacts on public health and on the energy system in a modern in a modern economy. And, you know, we could get into sort of a little bit more of why Fukushima itself happened and other reactors in Japan didn't.

40:33 And it mostly sort of boils down to sort of managerial a different managerial response by the reactor operators at Fukushima. But it was a sort of a sort of potent reminder of the power of these technologies. And I think that remains a power to be respected. You know, you hear, you know, from some corners of the sort of nuclear advocacy community that thing that these things are inherently safe. You just look at the statistics of the safest technology ever. And there's some truth in that. But the core of a nuclear reactor, of a civilian nuclear reactor is dangerous. Like we need cooling pools. We need dry cask storage. We ultimately need some kind of permanent storage. We need we need the sort of powerful safety protocols in terms of security, in terms of cement and in terms of backup backup safety for conventional light water reactors.

41:28 And we have those things, which is why there actually has never been any real harm caused at all by America's civilian nuclear power plants. And Fukushima kind of throws that into sharp relief and really, again, kind of necessitates the kind of diligence and the self-criticism that I think have been sort of inherent to the pro-nuclear movement's development since Fukushima. You know, I think you've answered that very well and very thoroughly. Right. Fukushima sort of stands as this one example of a nuclear accident in a technologically advanced and and sort of liberally advanced society. And even that event, I've got the Wikipedia up right now. There was one death, one one death suspected from radiation, which took place four years later.

42:20 Six people seem to have walked away with cancer or leukemia. There were 16 physical injuries due to hydrogen explosions, two workers hospitalized with radiation burns. And of course, about one hundred fifty thousand residents were displaced by the accident. And so that, you know, and again, as you say, when you compare that death toll and injury toll to what happens every day from cars, not even from car accidents, but just from the pollution and the use of other technologies, even before factoring in what changes, you know, in terms of the planetary damage from climate change, in terms of the cost changes to different families and how more precarious your life becomes when you are paying more for energies. Yeah, you can you can you can weigh these things pretty clearly. But then there is that one other topic, if we have time for it, which is storage.

43:06 That's the next question, which is what happens long term. Now, my understanding is this is fairly well figured out. You've got places in Europe and especially northern Europe building the infrastructure to be able to safeguard nuclear byproducts for millennia. But of course, you get the questions of, you know, is this really safe? Where do you actually store it, both in terms of people's comfort level and in terms of like what land you use? And then like with, you know, if it's I guess if it hasn't been millennia yet, we don't we haven't. It's not exactly tested for millennia. So how do we think about storing the byproducts of developing nuclear energy? Yeah, there's all sorts of things you can do with spent fuel, you know, nuclear waste, as it's called. You know, one of the things that that France does and a couple other countries around the world do is they recycle their waste where you take spent fuel, you reprocess it.

43:56 And then you can put it back into a reactor because if you have spent uranium rods that have been generating electricity for years, when when they're done in the United States and the most light light water reactor systems around the world, they still have like over 90 percent of fissile material in them. It's just it's it's just been degraded and needs to be needs to be sort of moderately reenriched to plug back into a reactor. So one thing you can do with the so-called nuclear waste is reprocess it and use it again. That said, there is like a like a financial and engineering cost to reprocessing spent fuel. And there at the end of the day are fairly low cost to society to just sticking spent fuel rods in a cooling pool for a couple of years so they can dissipate some of some of that some of that radiation.

44:49 And then packaging them in concrete cask storage and sticking them in a parking lot on on the grounds of the same power plant, which is what we do in the United States at our 60 odd nuclear power plants. If you go to a nuclear power plant somewhere nearby, somewhere very nearby, there will be a parking lot with a couple dozen huge, you know, sort of like one and a half, two story cement casks that have that are probably like 20 feet in diameter that have nuclear fuel rods in them. I've touched these dry casks, they are very safe and, you know, and as far as as far as we can tell, they will be safe in these parking lots for decades.

45:38 Now, if you want to like really confine the nuclear spent fuel, you, you want to bury it, basically. And there was, you know, the famous sort of Yucca Mountain nuclear repository in Nevada is probably not where we will ever store nuclear power for reasons of politics. And I mean that not in a dismissive way, a problem with the kind of engineering culture of nuclear power is that you come up with these systems to either operate or manage nuclear technology. And you just ignore all the social systems and the politics of it. And so, you know, so nuclear engineers and geologists found this hyperstable geologic formation in the Nevada desert, the best place in the country to where you could store a nuclear power plant deep under the earth because they don't have earthquakes and there's no aquifers.

46:35 And that's where you would want to put it from a geologist perspective, from an engineer's perspective, but not from Harry Reid's perspective and not from like other representatives of Nevada. And I don't want to sort of give due credit to the original NIMBYs, the no nuclear in my backyard folks. But you do actually have to take some democratic institutions and public opinion into account. And so Yucca Mountain sort of like struggles along for literal decades as various folks, including Harry Reid, holding up in the U.S. Senate. Now we still don't have a central permanent repository for our nuclear spent fuel. We have a report out from 2019 in which we propose some alternatives to centralized repositories, including reprocessing, but also including you could do sort of in situ deep geologic storage.

47:28 With the same kinds of technologies that were invented to frack for natural gas. Now that we've gotten really good at really deep earth drilling for both natural gas and oil and now geothermal, you can do something similar with with nuclear spent fuel. Just you just drill a mile under the earth's crust, bury your spent fuel and cover it in earth and it'll be there forever. Not hurting anybody. You could dig it back up if you wanted, but I don't know why you would want to. So those are some things you could do with it. Like I said, there's it's being stored and it has been stored safely for decades at the 60 odd power plants around the country. If you package all of it up, all of the nuclear spent fuel ever produced over over 60 years of operations of the power plants in America, it would cover the land area of a football field, you know, a couple of, you know, like 10 or 20 feet high.

48:22 So, again, this is a remarkably sort of land and material efficient technology that does need to be respected and taken seriously. And, you know, like at the moment, you know, you and I cannot just go build a nuclear reactor and it would be unwise to do so. But this is a if not a finally solved engineering and politics problem than one that we're in a pretty decent equilibrium on today, frankly. And there are many options for how we could improve upon the storage situation in the future. Do you have a hard stop right now? No, I can keep going. OK, cool. We'll wrap. But yeah, this is a little breathing room.

49:11 Well, Alex, you know, I really hope you you come back in very soon for a follow up and maybe a part two, because there's so much more to cover on these really important and interesting topics. Right. So much more to talk about on nuclear and solar and wind and batteries and climate change overall and what specific policies we should be advocating for and working on that will really unleash this energy and address any concerns. I also am very interested in the idea of future tech. Right. Which I think is is germane to you. You know, part of this conversation, the sort of headline around talking about abundance right now is, look, we have all the tools we need to right now transform the trajectory of climate change to say nothing of our energy and economic future.

49:57 But there's also this question of how do we develop technology that is even more green, more powerful, more affordable. And really, the only way to create new technology is to embrace today's technology and build from there. So I want to talk a lot about future tech. You're also very deep into the worlds of of food and agriculture, which is obviously connected with energy, connected with climate and certainly connected with with abundance. Right. How we how we find abundance of food is pretty important thing for for human life. And I think we can say that food is energy, at least for people. You know, I want to dive into China. What what have they done on energy? What can we learn from them? What should we not learn from them or learn from them in the you know, in the other direction? You know how the Breakthrough Institute ended up kind of aligning with with Yimbyism in the abundance movement, your life and trajectory.

50:44 I know you've worked, you know, this, I think, was your first job out of college. And you started as both, you know, spent time as a policy writer and a comms guy, which are very different roles. And it's exciting to see both of those, the sort of the rhetoric and the details put together. Now, of course, your deputy director and then, you know, why San Francisco was home to both the inception of the Yimby movement and the Breakthrough Institute. And then, of course, events. And that's that's kind of one of what I leave this on a plug for. And we can dive into this more in a part two. But a big part of the Breakthrough Institute's year right now is events and specifically a big coalitional and exciting abundance conference in Washington, D.C., which you've done before and which is coming up pretty soon. So I wonder if you can just leave us with a little bit of background and a pitch for the abundance conference and how people attend and get involved, why it's exciting, why they should, you know, take it seriously, think about it and put it at the top of their list and and why you value events so much at this moment when there's so much work to be done.

51:47 A lot of ground to cover. I would be thrilled to come back, Steve. Thank you again for having me. And yeah, one sort of final plug for what really brought us together, which is this abundance coalition. So I and a number of other sort of principles of this new abundance coalition will be co-hosting the second annual abundance conference in Washington, D.C. in the first week of September. Go to abundancedc.org. We've got, you know, a few hundred tickets for general admission for for folks of any sort of stripe or background who who want to attend and can make it to D.C. or for for the conference. You know, and the conferences is is really intended to be the kind of annual sort of flagship convening of at least the kind of think tank quadrant of the abundance coalition.

52:40 And it's you know, I don't want to be reductive. It's not just think tanks. You know, we've got like YIMBY action there and we've got the the abundance network there.

52:50 You know, a number of organizations who might describe themselves as advocates or think and do tanks. But really, this is the kind of home for this, the sort of is the is the kind of event for the abundance coalition to come together in person to discuss both its successes and the and the sort of remaining promises and frictions in its sort of policy agenda. So it's it's co-hosted this year by 15 abundance organizations, including Breakthrough and Inclusive Abundance and the Institute for Progress and Foundation for American Innovation and R Street Federation of American Scientists. I don't want to leave leave too many people out, but you can go to abundance DC dot org to see all of the co-hosts and we'll be featuring conversations about about permitting reform, about AI, about immigration, about health care, about sort of local government.

53:45 You know, the nice thing and frankly, the daunting thing about abundance is that it kind of is a skeleton key to unlock all sorts of issues and subject matters, which I think which I think is why abundance has a notion and as a coalition has so much wind behind its sails right now, not just in the Democratic Party, but especially in the Democratic Party. The conversations downstream of the conversations downstream of Ezra and Derek book and the sort of launching of of organizations like yours and the kind of abundance imperative within sort of capital, the Democratic intrafractional politics right right now. So, you know, the abundance conference is meant to be, again, the sort of annual gathering of that sort of burgeoning and growing movement.

54:37 I've been doing events for over a decade, the Breakthrough Institute used to co-host an annual West Coast and East Coast event. And a few years ago, I started talking with some of our partners about kind of transforming and sort of merging our East Coast policy event with some of our partners in the abundance coalition and sort of co-branding and co-building a shared abundance conference. Which, you know, which, you know, if anything, in this age of AI and large language models and the sort of atomization caused by social media and the sort of disintermediation of the sort of news infosphere caused by Substack and Twitter and Blue Sky and threads and all these things.

55:26 It's just becoming harder and harder, not just to have a kind of shared platform for discourse, but even a shared sense of truth and what is real, like what is produced by humans and what is produced by machines. Not to say that what is produced by machines is not real, but it is it's just increasingly difficult to kind of pin down a sort of shared reality. And one way to do that is through in-person sort of social interaction where you have sort of sustained conversations that are not accomplished through like tweets or inboxes, but are accomplished through or even over podcasts or Zooms, which obviously I love, but are accomplished through in-person engagement. So I find myself, even after doing events and programming events for over a decade at this point, even more energized in the age of AI and in the kind of downfall or whatever you want to call it of Twitter to host and organize a sort of really sort of well curated in-person intensive conversations and convenings of movements that otherwise would just not see each other in person.

56:30 So that's what we're trying to do, both that kind of practical abundance focus, but then also like human level. And I'm excited. You know, like I said, abundancedc.org, check it out and buy a ticket if you can. Man, this is so exciting. And I really cannot wait for that conference. And you've named, I think, three of the biggest reasons I'm so excited about it, right? One is something we talked a lot about with our happy hour in San Francisco that you are embodying here is if we want to bring abundance to America and maybe the world beyond, beyond that, we need to start with a culture of abundance ourselves. And so bringing together all those organizations and all those advocates who hit this from different directions to work together to build this movement and grow this movement is so exciting. You mentioned, you know, online, it's not really clear what's real anymore.

57:17 And that is before the big boom of AI videos and non-human facsimiles, either of real people or people who don't exist at all, that is going to explode in the next few years. And, of course, you know, our culture, our society, it's sort of come apart at the seams. I certainly think a lot of that is how we design our cities and our public squares and the fact that we live in the fortresses of our homes and our cars and aren't together. And so, you know, you've named this conference as a moment to bring together this world of abundance and build that culture as a moment to transcend the unreality online for the reality of real people together and to bring people together, which is the only place that real conversations, real authentic connections and, of course, real change can truly come from.

58:09 So I'm very excited about that. Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute, before we get you out of here, any last minute plugs or thoughts you want to get in there? Follow the Breakthrough Journal on Substack. Follow me on Twitter at ATrembath and follow Steve and what he's doing. It's a really exciting podcast, really exciting project. Really pleased to be here. Well, Alex, thank you so much. It's been an absolute honor and a delightful conversation. Thanks for joining us on Radio Abundance. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Steve. You've been listening to Radio Abundance. Join the movement for Progressive Abundance at YimbyDemocrats.org. Yes, we can build again. Yes, we can trounce the fascists. Yes, you can be the difference. This is AI, by the way.

58:54 You think these jokers actually got Obama? Check in with me in a few months. It'll happen. Thank you for listening to Radio Abundance, a new podcast by Yimby Democrats for America. Now it's time for you to join the movement. We're building a big tent, and it's going to take all of us. Join us, and together we'll fight to build America, defeat fascism, and unleash the era of Progressive Abundance. Join the movement at YimbyDemocrats.org. Thank you.