J.D. Vance has a good opinion about Joe Rogan’s podcast

J.D. Vance touted the benefits of nuclear power on Joe Rogan’s podcast and suggested the costs as much as it costs build an aircraft carrier to provide the U.S. electrical grid with enough equipment to quickly restore power after a major power outage.

During three hour interview released Thursday morning, the Republican vice presidential candidate repeatedly criticized environmental groups for what he saw as hypocrisy, opposing the most efficient and widespread form of carbon-free electricity and describing planet-warming emissions as an existential threat.

“If you think that carbon is the most important thing, (that) the sole purpose of American civilization should be to reduce the world’s carbon footprint, then you would invest heavily in nuclear power,” Vance said.

“When you say that, environmentalists say, ‘Well, then you have to deal with all these toxic rocks,’” he added, referring to the radioactive waste left behind after the reactor is refueled with freshly enriched uranium. “Well, the poison rock problem is less of a problem than the carbon problem if you think we’ll all be extinct in 100 years. So let’s deal with the most pressing problem.”

Nuclear power plants produce relatively little physical waste per unit of electricity produced, compared with the mountains of toxic ash emitted by coal-fired power plants or the unrecyclable wind turbine blades and solar panels that now accumulate in landfills.

Unlike other forms of waste, every bit of spent nuclear fuel is strictly regulated and monitored by national and international authorities. The vast majority of spent nuclear fuel remains in power plants, waiting for the federal government to come up with a plan for what to do with it in the long term. It will take thousands of years to decompose.

The US built and then abandoned the Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada to store nuclear waste indefinitely. Finland has just opened the world’s first permanent waste storage facility, where sealed containers containing spent fuel rods can be buried deep underground. But France, Russia and Britain are reprocessing their spent nuclear fuel, which still contains about 95% of the energy after leaving the reactor, turning it into fresh fuel or extracting valuable radioactive isotopes for medical treatment.

The US closed its first nuclear waste reprocessing plant in the 1970s, but several new companies are working to commercialize spent fuel reprocessing technologies with federal government funding.

Vance’s comments stand in stark contrast to those of his running mate, former President Donald Trump, who appeared on Rogan’s show. warned last week that nuclear reactors are too expensive and pose “dangers.” (That’s the exact opposite of as recently as August, when Trump told conservative podcaster Sean Ryan that “nuclear power is now very good and very safe.”)

During his time in the White House, Trump signed two major pieces of legislation supporting nuclear energy and took a number of executive actions to support the sector. But momentum to revive the industry has reached critical mass under President Joe Biden, whose landmark infrastructure legislation has poured billions into preserving existing reactors and testing and building new reactors. The law also offered long-term tax breaks for any type of carbon-free electricity, including nuclear power.

If elected, Trump and Vance have promised to eliminate many of these subsidies.

Vance also called Russia “the largest funder of the green energy movement in Europe.” While this claim is almost certainly exaggerated, the 2022 report The Foundation for Policy Innovation, a liberal think tank headquartered in Paris, found that Russian state gas company Gazprom funded certain environmental non-profits that promoted the eventual phaseout of nuclear power in countries such as Belgium. Before taking office as Belgium’s energy minister in 2020 and embarking on plans to close the country’s nuclear power plants, Tinne Van der Straten, a member of the Green Party, owned 50% a law firm whose main client was Gazprom.

“Why are the Russians funding? It’s not because they care about climate change. That’s because they want the Germans and everyone else to buy Russian natural gas,” Vance said. “They understand that if the Germans and French close all their coal and nuclear plants, Russia will take them by the balls.”

However, Vance, whose campaign promised to boost already historically high levels of U.S. oil and gas production, questioned the urgency of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Deriding climate advocates as “carbon obsessed”, he said the continued hesitancy of some activists to support nuclear power shows that “they clearly don’t believe their own bullshit, so I’m skeptical of what they’re saying.”

The Republican vice presidential nominee then turned to another shaky energy policy issue: the nation’s supply of electrical transformers.

As extreme weather events become more common (which scientists believe has been caused by rising temperatures), severe storms are destroying electrical transformers at an increasing rate. Transformers are the backbone of the power system and act like duct lock systems, raising and lowering electrical levels as electrons move from generators through wires to wall outlets.

As severe storms and heat waves wreak havoc on existing transformers, late upgrades to the aging power grid are driving up demand for replacements.

However, manufacturers are struggling to keep up. Faced with nationwide shortages, the Biden administration in April rolled back a regulatory overhaul that plant owners complained prevented them from ramping up production of the transformers in demand today.

Vance made no mention of the impact of climate change on the country’s transformer supply. Instead, he described a so-far fictitious scenario in which the US could be hit by an electromagnetic pulse that would set the electrical grid on fire – something federal experts say would be possible if an adversary detonated an atomic bomb at high altitude above US Americans. I have only ever experienced one such event, when the pulse from a nuclear bomb test in the Pacific Ocean traveled 800 miles to the east, briefly disrupting street lighting and telephone service in parts of Hawaii.

To ensure a quick recovery from such an attack, Vance said, the federal government should stockpile enough spare transformers so they can be replaced when they fail.

“In fact, I think it’s a scandal that the federal government – at some point, with all the money we spend on defense and everything else – just didn’t say we’re going to spend $15 billion to buy enough military transformers to have a backup for every transformer in the country,” he said.