Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, we’ve been talking about the reaction processes themselves, but I think fundamentally, let’s take a step back and look a little broader and say, let’s look at what we care about, which is the power plant, making electricity. I look at this from a nuclear engineer’s point of view. I spent a lot of years studying these systems. Modern fission reactors, I believe, are engineered to be safe. They’re engineered in ways where as those reactions maybe speed up and those systems get hotter, they actually are built to expand and cool down passively and natively. There are protection systems in place that modern systems are quite safe from an engineering perspective. So I believe that we have figured out how to build nuclear fission reactors in a way where the engineering of the power plant is safe. I would say that I look back at the history of what we’ve built over time, and the challenge hasn’t come to the engineering, actually. I believe the engineers have solved these problems. The problem comes from humans, and the problem comes from other things around nuclear power. You have to enrich that uranium to put it in a plant, and the plant’s safe, but you had to enrich that uranium, and that is some of the problem. Or a plant is designed to run for a certain number of decades safely, but do we run it longer than that? And so those are where I think the real challenges happen, is more with the humans around these systems than the engineering of the power plants themselves. Well, I have to ask then, what do you think happened in Chernobyl? What lessons do we learn from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and maybe also Three Mile Island and Fukushima accidents? I think you’re suggesting that it has to do with the humans a bit. So with Chernobyl and Fukushima, I actually put Three Mile Island in a different category. In fact, some of the recent news in the last year is that we’re going to be restarting Three Mile Island, because there’s such a need for clean base load power. So that’s actually a very interesting other topic we should talk about is, is why and how we’re doing that. But more than that, going back to the accidents that did happen in both of those systems, you can point to the human failure rather than the engineering failures of those systems. That in Fukushima specifically, there were multiple nuclear fission reactors on the same site that successfully kept running through the tsunami, totally successfully, and were only later shut down for more political reasons. But the old one, the oldest of them that had been on site for long periods, and maybe too long, I think some experts have looked at this in the past was where some of the problems actually happened. And so, I look to that less as a failure of the engineering of the power plants, and more of the humans around those systems. That we should be operating these plants as designed, and then I believe they’re safe. And that gets to some of the atomic weapons questions that I think are the other part around nuclear reactors and fission reactors that are concerning for me.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.