Our partner Anna Michel from SpaceShip One joins us on an exclusive interview with Mathjis Becker on his documentary “Atom Exit”.
[Mathijs:] That started back in 2008, when I started worrying about climate change, and I thought, “I need to do something about this.” It took me about two years to get acquainted with the energy discussion, to see what everybody was saying, and then, all of a sudden, my interest really sparked when I saw this plan to create this “100% renewable” world, which is The Solutions Project by Mark C. Jacobson.
I wanted to know, what is it going to cost? How many of these panels and how many of these windmills do we need? How much land are we going to require to do this? And I emailed them. I didn’t get a response. So instead of asking around and asking around, I took my calculator, and I downloaded every piece of information that I could get from The Solutions Project. And I started basically re-modeling what they had done, which took me about half a year to get it all down to a “T”.
I discovered what they are asking of us to do is that we, first of all, put our faith in renewables; then, everybody in the world basically has to stop developing. People from rich countries need to do more with less, which I’m fine with, but also the developing countries basically don’t get anything extra. And that was the point when I thought, “This is not right.” And then I started to look at other things, for instance, material usage in renewables, and I also started getting an interest in nuclear energy. That’s basically what set me down this path.
[Mathijs:] My last book was published two years ago, which is called Climate Zero Hour. Climate Zero Hour is basically the culmination of this whole adventure to look at the “100% renewable” plans: all the analysis that I’ve done about material usage, the impacts that it will have on the poor, and my foray into the nuclear world. Before I started writing that book, I also started traveling a lot, meeting a lot of people, especially in the nuclear sector, because I was really interested in what new solutions were coming up. This is all bundled within this Climate Zero Hour book.
I made a similarly named documentary called Climate Zero Hour for which I traveled to places like California, London, etc., and talked to a lot of energy experts to basically boost that narrative. The last two years have galvanized the idea that we really need to push harder on nuclear than on renewables. Renewables have their momentum; they will keep building renewables from now until year 2100, and who knows, maybe even 100 years from then. But, nuclear at this moment is really this misunderstood technology, and it’s so poignant to see.
I live three kilometers from the German border. And the Germans were absolutely freaked out by Fukushima, right? Fukushima happened in 2011. And they basically said, “Okay, from now on, we are going to drop nuclear. We are going to stop within 11 years. We’re going to do everything in our power to stop using nuclear power.”
And that’s what brought me to the decision to make a documentary about that. It’s called Atom Exit, which is basically the English translation for “atom ausstieg”, which is what the Germans call it. And they’ve given it a different name: Energiewende, or “energy transition”. Basically, what they’re trying to do is trying to convince themselves that they can move away from nuclear, and that they are champions of renewables, which they are in a certain way, but they’re failing the people because they keep burning coal, and they keep investing in natural gas infrastructure. They’re basically regressing. That’s what the focus of my documentary is.
[Mathijs:] Nuclear energy has been the largest source of clean energy in Europe for decades. And if we weren’t so — sorry that I’m saying it — weren’t so stupid to think that we could replace nuclear with renewables, Europe would be in a far better place today than we are now.
This is the stuff that gets my blood flowing. They act as if “100% renewables” is the goal. The goal should be to stabilize the climate as much as possible, while notmaking the poor pay for it. Renewables, even though they are to some degree cheap, are not cheap enough that they can offset all the extra costs that they bear— for instance, the extra investments that need to be done in an energy grid and all the backup power that needs to be arranged, batteries and whatnot. If you tally all of that up, it makes the electricity bill higher instead of lower. It’s not a fair transition.
[Mathijs:] Yes, this is something that we do at the e-Lise Foundation, of which I’m Chairman. We really try to detach this from ideology; we really want to make this a universal issue that is going to benefit all.
If you look at Europe, usually the Greens are those people who are opposed to nuclear. In Sweden, the Greens are now at a point where they say, “Okay, we need to keep our nuclear reactors running for as long as possible. because losing those would mean that we would need to burn more gas or biomass or coal.”
In Finland, the Greens are even further. There they are openly supporting nuclear energy. I’ve also got a couple of Polish friends, they are a group called FOTA4Climate. And they are very left-leaning, progressive, and they see nuclear as one of those technologies that will tax nature the least, to make Poland a country that is affluent.
You see this happening in all these different countries, even in my own country in the Netherlands. Right now, the Greens are still trying to come out as being vehemently anti-nuclear. But there are more and more Greens, also, sounding the horn and saying, “Listen, we need to either consider nuclear, or this is something that we really support.”
So it’s happening, it’s happening everywhere. I believe that once we can get out of this polarized debate and not make it about ideology, but make it about reaching a better sustainable future for our children— that’s the moment when we finally enact change.
[Mathijs:] Well, on the political spectrum I score all over the place. But I do love nature. I can really enjoy a good walk in a forest, or a vista on top of a mountain. It’s something that I care deeply about; I have two children, and they have the right to live on a healthy planet that is healthy, that has all these beautiful things to offer that I can see right now.
Suppose that I had a lot of money, and I could do one thing in the Netherlands— besides building nuclear power plants, because that will be the first thing that I would do— the second thing that I would do, and this is something that I actually played with (we were actually planning to start a utility instead of a foundation): I would actually arrange that a part of the proceeds of creating power and selling it to people, a part of those proceeds would be set aside to be invested in nature— buying back pieces of land from farmers in areas where we really still have some actual nature in the Netherlands. So, yes, there is a Green in me.
[Mathijs:] Yes, I do like indie, and my work is independent. When I’ve got an idea, and I really want to achieve something, I just jump in. I ask some of my friends, “would you like to help me with this?” It’s not that well-polished, as you could expect from some professional documentary shooter, who knows his stuff, who has a camera crew, etc. All I had was a friend, and we drove 3,000 kilometers through Germany. He basically was my boom pole operator.
[Mathijs:] Time constraints; some shots were in suboptimal situations, and this had to do with a very tight schedule. We were driving 3,000 kilometers through Germany in six days, which meant that we only had two or three hours, tops, per location. If you have that limited time, everything is one take. If there’s something in speech that is distracting, I cut it out, but this gives you jumpy footage. I used B roll and stock footage to hide some of it, but not all of it is hidden.
[Mathijs:] I’ve been following the American energy situation— for instance, the rolling blackouts of California last year, or the Texas blackout, and the stuff that you see happening in Ohio with Davis-Besse and the Perry nuclear power stations.
Nuclear is undervalued in some states in the US. If you look at Diablo Canyon, it is a perfectly fine nuclear power plant. It could easily operate for another 10 or 20, maybe even 30 years. Sorry, I’m going to call it stupid— there’s this stupid piece of legislation that says Diablo Canyon cannot have its once-through cooling system. They’re asking PG&E to do something about the cooling system of Diablo Canyon, but that’s cost-prohibitive.
So PG&E says, “Okay, you know what? We’re going to close down Diablo Canyon, because this is simply not worth it, to get it up to policy standard.” Meanwhile, they’re trying to build massive amounts of solar and wind. But if you look at those days of rolling blackouts in California, what you clearly see is that there’s just not enough spinning reserve in California itself to pick up the slack.
If you would build another Diablo Canyon— let’s say two of those— that would alleviate a lot of the pressure on the generation. My takeaway from what is happening in the US is that you need to value nuclear power better. The markets are structured in such a way that they undervalue the nuclear assets that are available to you. I think that’s the main lesson that you need to learn over there.
[Mathijs:] It’s the largest source of clean energy, by far. And, if I may go back to the Germans’ situation, what you see there is actually the point you don’t want to get to. That’s the point that you get freaked out by nuclear energy so much, that you even willingly accept a power source like lignite-fired coal plants, the dirtiest stuff that you can burn.
Pushker Kharecha from Columbia University and his colleague, Sato, published a paper in 2019, where they said that 16,000 Europeans may end up dying prematurely if Germany keeps their coal-fired power plants open and running until 2038, as they are planning right now, and shut down their nuclear plants, as they’re doing right now.
I used their own methodology, and I calculated it back until 2007. It turns out that already, around 11,000 people have died from that decision, using that methodology. You end up with almost 27,000 people dying just because you’re freaked out by nuclear energy. That’s just crazy. I just don’t get it.
The German Atom Exit is going forward by sheer inertia. Bureaucracy takes a lot of time, so even if they would get together in German politics and enact a law that would stop the Atom Exit, it would still be incredibly hard to save the remaining six nuclear power plants— which gives the impression that it’s not a lot, but these are all big guys, 1.4-gigawatt units. There’s even a couple of two-unit power plants that are being shut down.
What we decided to do is A) make this documentary and show the world what this lunacy really is, and B) we also want to turn this whole thing around— instead of focusing on what is going wrong, what can we do to make it better.
Initially, we wanted to start this utility in the Netherlands. Then it turned out that there’s actually a couple of utilities in the Netherlands that are interested in building new nuclear reactors. We have a group of nuclear experts and economists in our foundation, and we basically figured out, “Okay, let’s start a foundation, and we’re going to do whatever we can do to maximize the chance that new nuclear reactors get built.”
What I would like to see is something similar happening in the US, because there’s some really cool developments going on in the nuclear world. I personally am very enamored by the IMSR from Terrestrial Energy, the BWRX by GE Hitachi. There’s so many cool new reactor concepts that are commercially available within now and five years or so that we really need to start planting the seeds.
We need to start mobilizing communities in such a way that they say, “Okay, we want to participate in this.” Illinois, for instance, Illinois has four, and those reactors are in the line of fire as we speak. They’re about to lose those reactors. The same can be said for California. So we mobilize people there not just to save these nuclear power plants, but also get legislatures, utilities, and maybe new corporations that are interested in actually providing a counterpunch: “Okay, we may lose these plants but we are going to do our utmost to build new ones instead.”
That’s what I want to say ending this conversation between us two. And this is my message to all my friends in America, and all the rest of the people who are listening who are not from America, and that’s that we actually can do something, and we should start doing it.