A Thin Dusting of Plutonium

What is the Anthropocene, and when might it have started? What is the great acceleration? Can we expect, or engineer, a great deceleration? What can we learn from nuclear history about nuclear futures? Featuring Travis Olds, Assistant Curator of Minerals at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Nicole Heller, Associate Curator of Anthropocene Studies at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Encounter Trinitite glass, mentioned in this episode, in the exhibition The Stories We Keep: Bringing the World to Pittsburgh.

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Transcript

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Michael Pisano 0:00

You're listening to the Anthropocene Archives, a presentation of We Are Nature. In this special series of stories, we're delving deep into Carnegie Museum of Natural History's 22 million collection items, raiding cabinets and cases, sifting through objects and organisms in search of stories of stewardship, solutions, and scientific wonder. On today's episode, grasping a new geological epoch, researching radioactive rocks, and conquering our fear of creation. Grab your Geiger counter and get ready to rock. Welcome to We Are Nature, a show about natural histories and livable futures presented by Carnegie Museum of Natural History. I'm your host, natural history enthusiast and livable futures envisioner, Michael Pisano, and I'm thrilled to be back at the museum recording amongst the Carnegie's 22 million collection items to share exclusive stories from the staff who steward and study these treasures. Today, I'm joined by two such treasure stewards and studiers. Friends, please introduce yourselves.

Travis Olds 1:17

Hi, I'm Travis Olds. I'm Assistant Curator of Minerals. I focus on uranium minerals and crystallography.

Michael Pisano 1:24

Awesome.

Nicole Heller 1:25

Hi, my name is Nicole Heller and I am Associate Curator of Anthropocene Studies. So I am a conservation scientist by training and I work here at the museum doing exhibition and education and research around this concept of the Anthropocene.

Michael Pisano 1:42

Yes, and you've also taken on the very honorable role of producer of this season of We Are Nature and helped us kind of frame the big picture, you know, connecting stories about the museum's collections to some ideas about the day and age we live in. I wonder if you could kind of expand on what we are trying to do to link this collection of collection stories together.

Nicole Heller 2:03

Yeah, so I mean this, the wonderful thing about the concept of the Anthropocene, which we will talk more about, but it's really this meta concept that's really related to all the collections here at the museum. And so traditionally with natural history, there was often a kind of siloing of different areas where each collection was sort of its own entity and studied by itself in many ways, you know, the bird collection or the mineral collection, very taxonomic approach. But these days in the moment we're in and really understanding the interconnections between human life and ecologies. There's an interest in understanding our collections, kind of stories that connect the collections, right? Or how we can use the collections to understand these phenomena in the world that we face today. And so almost every object in our collection, of the 22 million objects, I think you could find a connection in a way to the Anthropocene or how humans are affecting the planet. And so that's really I think the part of the inspiration for this podcast we've been working on is finding this kind of object-based storytelling, right? Or using the objects as a way in to these important social, ecological, geological stories that kind of make up nature in the world today.

Michael Pisano 3:24

Excellent. Just to make sure we're all on the same page. Can you give us a quick definition of the Anthropocene?

Nicole Heller 3:30

Yes, yes. So the Anthropocene is a proposed current geological epoch that we're in right now. And so what is a geological epoch? You might be thinking, what is this? And it really has to do with the geology time series, which is kind of a way that scientists keep track. It's like a calendar of kind of the history of the Earth over about four billion years and how geologists sort of look at that rock record and use that to kind of parse time in a sense and divide the earth into periods of time that are really major moments in its evolution and transformation over time. Often it's much more about looking way back in deep history. So this is a little weird to be talking about a geological unit right in the present time, but kind of the way the story goes is atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen was at a meeting with a bunch of environmental scientists, and they were looking at a lot of Earth system data, and kind of a moment where it was like, hey, something's really different. We're no longer in the Holocene, the former time period. We're now in a new period of time. And he said, I think we're in the Anthropocene. Anthropocene, kind of human new time, kind of a new time of humans on Earth, or humans are driving Earth system processes at this period of time. And today we're going to be talking about some of the markers, literal markers in the sediment that mark this geological time unit.

Michael Pisano 5:03

That's perfect. And you've brought us right to this object, this collection item that's linked, like Nicole said, to the beginning of the Anthropocene, the proposed start.

Mackenzie Kimmel 5:15

This season of We Are Nature is being recorded in a room at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The room is dominated by row after row after row of black metal lockers. Each is marked with a precisely painted yellow number. The lockers are labeled with names like Lamiaceae and Poaceae. You will learn more about the locker's contents in due time. From time to time, the rows and rows of black lockers are interrupted by a table. Nicole, Travis, and Michael stand around one of these tables, contemplating two objects that sit on its yellow melamine surface. These are the collection items they intend to discuss. Every episode, I will describe the items on the table, their color, their size, their texture. I will be your eyes in the room. See if you can guess what each collection item is before the guests reveal its identity, starting now. Collection item one easily fits in the palm of your hand. It feels dense and cool to the touch. Smooth, translucent green patches are embedded throughout a gritty, tan substrate. Each tiny green patch reflects the fluorescent lights overhead in miniature. This item's collection information tag notes that this object was created on July 16, 1945, in Socorro County, New Mexico. Can you identify Collection Item 1?

Travis Olds 7:37

The first few milliseconds when the bomb was at its hottest, and I don't even know the temperature, but it was just sun level, surface sun hot.

Michael Pisano 7:46

Too hot.

Travis Olds 7:47

And it just melted everything. And even the desert glass around the site where the fireball reached, it just melted, I think in some places down to a few inches, which is a lot in sand.

Michael Pisano 8:01

Yeah.

Travis Olds 8:02

Yeah, so trinitite is the glassy rock formed from the first... nuclear test at the Trinity site in New Mexico. And a lot of it is just bubbly glass. It has a different texture in some pieces, depending on how far away from the bomb it was. It can have different colors, reds, grays, yellows. It incorporated parts of the tower that the bomb was on and pieces of the bomb itself.

Michael Pisano 8:30

And is this an official mineral? How should we refer to trinitite when we talk about i t?

Travis Olds 8:34

No, it's not an official mineral because it's man-made. It's an anthropogenic, you can call it a mineral, it ends in "-ite", and you would think it's a mineral, but no, because it's man-made, it's not accepted as a mineral.

Michael Pisano 8:48

Cool. What does nuclear testing have to do with the start of the Anthropocene?

Nicole Heller 8:52

Yeah, so the Anthropocene is this idea that when, you know, a new geological period starts, when human activity starts to dominate the Earth's system, okay, and humans have like all creatures always have an effect on their local environment. But the real question here is around impact on the whole earth. And that's what's kind of novel here. And so when does this start? When is it that humans have begun to kind of dominate or are like the primary drivers of our Earth system. And scientists have been debating this and bringing forth different kinds of evidence or a hypothesis about when this really begins. But from a stratigraphy perspective, the kind of way that science has done is it's really focused on looking for a signal of when kind of in the sedimentation layers, in those that will ultimately become rock over time, in those sediment layers, they're looking for a boundary in the stratigraphy when there's kind of a precise boundary and then it's found all over the globe. It's sort of not just in one local area, but it's uniform around the globe. And the best sort of marker of that or indicator that's showing up in sediment is around atomic bomb testing. So right around, so we mentioned 1945 is this first atomic bomb testing, but it takes a little while for there to start to be a lot of fallout. And by the 1950s, you're really seeing radioactive plutonium isotopes, which are a signature of these bomb testing, showing up all over the world and in sediment layers. And that is kind of what scientists were looking for, right? A marker that is precise in time, found around the world, and it's really where those human activities start to kind of dominate those sediment layers.

Michael Pisano 10:39

Yes, yes. The testing and that 50s start date is also linked with this idea of a great acceleration. I wonder if you can expand on that and also if you have anything to add from an earth science perspective or just what those words mean to you.

Travis Olds 10:52

Yeah to add on just using nuclear testing as a signal it's you know man's control of the atom peaked then yeah that was huge and and deposition of these layers of isotopes which have defined half-lives you can determine you know go back in time that's how many of these geologic epochs are determined you go back and you and you date them. And so I think this is a wonderful thing to use as the start of the Anthropocene.

Michael Pisano 11:24

Michael and Nicole from the future here. Pardon the interruption. We recorded this episode back in fall of 2023. And between then and now, when you're listening to it, something kind of important happened. Nicole, what happened?

Nicole Heller 11:45

Well, it turns out that the International Commission on Stratigraphy, who was the group deciding whether or not this proposed geological epoch would be accepted as a new time period that would start in 1950, well, turns out they rejected that proposal.

Michael Pisano 12:05

What happened? Why?

Nicole Heller 12:07

Yeah, I think it's pretty complicated. And really, it comes down to a handful of people who made this decision. While no one really disputes what's happening, right? No one disputes that the Earth system has changed significantly in response to human interactions. No one really disputes that. But I think a lot of technical questions remain about beginning a new geological epoch in such a recent time period, right? 1950.

Michael Pisano 12:35

That's really not normal.

Nicole Heller 12:37

That's really not normal.

Michael Pisano 12:38

How long ago did the Holocene start?

Nicole Heller 12:40

The Holocene started 11,800 years ago around, and it's kind of called like new time. So in a sense, that was like...

Michael Pisano 12:49

It's the baby. That was the baby, right? That was really, really new to be even looking back thousands of years. Because again, right, this is a calendar that's looking across over 4 billion years of Earth history. So... Talking about 75 years is a little uncomfortable, I think, for the geological community, and you know, I think there continued to be debate about when does this start? Is it an epoch? Is it an event? How should it be marked? And really, can we understand kind of how sediments that were laid down only in the last couple decades or in our lifetime, how those would really fare and how scientists a million years from now might look back at this period? And so I think, for those kind of technical reasons that it's premature to make this decision. Right. We have to remember that geologists are operating at a different time scale. They're taking all the time they need.

Nicole Heller 13:54

Yes.

Michael Pisano 13:54

In the meantime, where does that leave the Anthropocene? If it's not an epoch, what is it?

Nicole Heller 13:59

Yeah, I mean, it is a key word, and it's an extremely useful word. And that's kind of the beauty of it. You know, I myself was pretty nervous, right, when I heard that this, that it wasn't going to be ratified and officially become a geological time period. I thought, oh, no, here I am, a curator of this thing.

Michael Pisano 14:18

It's in your job title, yeah.

Nicole Heller 14:21

Right. But rest assured, or I've been relieved that, you know, most people in environmental sciences, in humanities, the arts, kind of across scholarly and public domains, people are continuing to use the term Anthropocene. Our museum is continuing to use it as are others. And that's because at the end of the day, it's a really useful term to refer to these big complex changes that are happening on our planet and that define the present era and really point to the relationship of humans collectively with our planet. And I think the word serves as that wake-up call for recognizing that a lot of this change is not sustainable and not safe, and that we need to kind of reverse some of these trends to have that future, to protect that future we all want.

Nicole Heller 15:20

Travis, I was curious, if you think about this plutonium, right, that's suddenly showing up in the sediment from the deposition, like, would there have been anything else sort of naturally producing plutonium to show up?

Travis Olds 15:34

So when the Earth was first formed, yes, there was enough plutonium agglomerated that there was still some left, and that decayed out within the first probably few million years, so... initial Earth was very radioactive.

Nicole Heller 15:50

Okay. But then more recently, like this is novel to suddenly, like if you were a geologist and you just stumbled upon this layer of plutonium, what would you think?

Travis Olds 16:00

Yeah, totally. There's no other way to make plutonium other than through bombarding with neutrons, and that's a man-made process, so...

Michael Pisano 16:08

Gotcha. Let's talk about that great acceleration bit for a second, and then I want to come back to exactly this point of kind of human interaction with radioactive materials and maybe novel things that we start finding. But first, what is the great acceleration?

Nicole Heller 16:22

Yeah, so the great acceleration is, it's a term coined by historians, and it's really about kind of thinking about the last sort of 250 or 350 years and how social, economic, ecological indicators, Earth system indicators and how those have changed. And when you look at these graphs, whether you're looking at something like human population size or GDP or use of fresh water or number of dams, like these kind of social side metrics, if we look at how those change over time, they're sort of growing from 1750 steadily and then they just accelerate right around 1950 and they all start accelerating around the same time. At the same time, when you look at Earth's system changes like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or methane or how acidic our oceans are or the warming of the planet. They show the same sort of gradual increases and then this rapid acceleration right around 1950. So that's why this period is called the Great Acceleration. And it's really when kind of global technological change just boom, just goes kind of wild along with human population. And the Great Acceleration, I think, is a part of why scientists proposed that the Anthropocene starts in 1950 because of this kind of understanding of this sort of state system change or this sort of just acceleration in all of these human-driven processes and that showing up in the sediment as well as in kind of processes that we are coming to struggle with like climate change and these other...you know, biodiversity loss. So there's kind of how all these things sort of connect together.

Michael Pisano 18:03

Exactly. Thank you. And I wonder how it's expressed kind of, I know part of your scholarship is in understanding the nuclear fuel cycle and in human interaction with radioactive minerals. So how is this great acceleration concept reflected in the advancement of either nuclear technology or maybe the genesis of novel radioactive material?

Travis Olds 18:25

Hey, we owe a lot of advancements to our understanding of the atom and especially medical technologies and understanding of CT scans and PET scans, positron emission tomography, which is one of the best ways to be able to find cancer in someone. It's really radical science. You eat a radioactive isotope, it concentrates in the areas that are growing most, so the cancers, tumors, and then it decays. Perfectly 180 emission. And that's how this positron emission works. It measures that time between the detections and it can pinpoint in your body where the tumor cell is.

Michael Pisano 19:02

And then what about out in the world? I know that you have been a part of describing many novel materials that have a radioactive kind of part to them. How does that kind of map to this exponential kind of curve of progress or the fallout from these events?

Travis Olds 19:19

Yeah, along with that massive influx in progress came a lot of waste, mine tailings, waste to produce the plutonium that made the bombs and it's scattered throughout the country and this is something that to this day people are having trouble cleaning up and part of what I do when we look for new minerals is we're using these uranium mines as an analog to underground storage or a leaking tank, what kind of phases might form underground and we want to understand the chemistry of each of these crystals to help clean it up.

Michael Pisano 19:54

I mean, I see you starting to gesture to this other collection item and it feels like it's related to what you're saying.

Mackenzie Kimmel 19:59

Travis is holding a rectangular beige device next to collection item two. The box emits a cascade of chirps.

Travis Olds 20:18

So this is a Russian Geiger counter.

Michael Pisano 20:22

It's such a cool object in itself.

Travis Olds 20:24

Yeah, I bought that on eBay like 15 years ago. Inside there's a tube filled with a gas that detects the invisible radiation coming off of it. You can't see it, but it's happening.

Michael Pisano 20:38

It really is. And how much longer will it be happening for? Can you guess that?

Travis Olds 20:43

So the half-life is something like 4.5 billion years, so about the age of the Earth. So for another... Many, many billion years it will be detectable.

Michael Pisano 20:56

All right.

Mackenzie Kimmel 20:58

If it weren't for the alpha, beta, and gamma radiation particles causing this frenzy of haunted Game Boy sound effects, you might be tempted to taste the enthralling crystals that coat the top of Collection Item 2. The forbidden candies grow from a dark gray, irregular hunk of rock. The rock is small, about three inches long by one inch wide and half an inch tall. The crystals form a minuscule, mossy, glossy carpet, only a millimeter thick at its tallest point. Looking closely, you discern two separate types of crystal. One is relatively larger, with whitish tinted tips protruding from a deep bluish green base, like a miniature ocean wave frozen in mid-motion. The second type of crystal is much smaller, appearing as patches of stubble across the rock face. These crystals are bright yellowish green, an acidic, high-vis stippling on the dull gray stone. What is Collection Item 2?

Travis Olds 22:36

Yep, so this is a sample from an abandoned uranium mine, we go underground with permission and collect samples from what was left of the ore from when they mined out the ore. So over time, 30 to 50 or so years, it gets damp and wet and things start to oxidize and rust. And uranium rusts in really beautiful colors.

Nicole Heller 23:00

And did you say this was a novel, like a new mineral?

Travis Olds 23:03

Yep. The green mineral is called andersonite, which is a calcium uranyl carbonate. And then right next to it are these kind of yellowish crystals of a brand new phase, a uranium selenite carbonate. Underground, it's very humid, it's damp, and this region sees monsoonal rains, essentially, that just dump water that comes through in waves. So a lot of these uranium minerals, the colorful ones at least, are water-soluble, or in a little bit of acidic solution, they'll be soluble, so it doesn't take much , and rainwater is enough to get it to start flowing. And this is what leads to the formation of new things on the mine wall. So we use these specimens that we collect as analogs to potential underground storage, deep geologic repository of nuclear waste or spent fuel.

Michael Pisano 23:58

What can you learn about them by examining this analog?

Travis Olds 24:04

So when things crystallize, they lock in the conditions of the water that was acting on it. So when we know the chemistry, the structure, we can then work backwards to try to think, oh, how can we prevent this kind of oxidation from happening and uranium from reaching the groundwater?

Michael Pisano 24:22

And my understanding is that this isn't the only new to science, newly described mineral you've been a part of finding. Can you just expand on that and shine on yourself a little bit?

Travis Olds 24:34

Yeah, well we're part of a team and so when we go out and collect, you know, sometimes we get really lucky. And that's really what finding a new mineral species is about. I'd say it's like 90% luck and then 10% knowing what you have and recognizing that you should check it. I've been involved in a little over 30 mineral species and the bulk of those are uranium bearing. So we're learning a lot about uranium chemistry, especially in these old uranium mines. And it has been and continues to be one of our best bets to understand a long-term nuclear waste storage.

Michael Pisano 25:12

Gotcha. And maybe it's obvious, but what's the problem with that?

Travis Olds 25:17

Yeah, so really uranium is more of a toxic metal than it is a concern for radioactivity. Yes, it's radioactive. Yes, it's bad if it gets inside of you, but it's a heavy metal. And so it kind of acts like lead, gives you a toxic reaction to the metal. And so this is a really... awful problem in many parts of the Western US. So Arizona, parts of New Mexico, where it was Native American land, DOE and whatever nuclear acronym at the time came in and they took over. And what was dumped was just dumped right outside the mine. And usually these canyons have rivers flowing through them. And so rainwater leaches from the tailings, they're filled with the ore. and it pollutes the water that the Native Americans and their livestock drink. And so that just, it's kind of this continual ecosystem of toxicity in parts of Arizona, especially.

Michael Pisano 26:19

I'm glad that you were specific about the location and the peoples affected, because this brings up another important aspect of how we think about the Anthropocene now, which is through a social lens. I wonder if you could speak to kind of what that story inspires for you and if we can zoom out from that into when we think intersectionally about a problem like uranium in a waterway.

Nicole Heller 26:40

In thinking about something like the Anthropocene, a lot of the scholarship and interest is really about thinking of it as like a twin problem of both a crisis of unsustainability and of kind of rapid change that is really making us vulnerable. And I think climate change is the best example of that. But also this twin problem of inequity and the way that some people are more vulnerable than others and are made more vulnerable and this kind of legacy of which populations or communities are seeing our kind of sacrifice zones are allowed to be places where we put waste that is dangerous or where atomic bomb testing maybe happened and those communities really didn't have a choice in that matter and are still struggling with the public health impacts of that work. I mean, my understanding is that Trinity, that the community there has been suing about the public health impacts that that atomic bomb testing has had on their public health and kind of keeping people, company, governments accountable has been, I think is one of the really hard parts of this as well.

Travis Olds 27:49

No, like many of the mines around you know, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania, it's some mining company. They come in, they do their business and then either they go bankrupt on purpose or redissolve or, you know, slough off their responsibility for cleanup. And that was the legacy from late forties to about the early nineties in a lot of places out West.

Michael Pisano 28:14

Sure. And I think, um, we pretty commonly associate nuclear materials with disaster, even atrocity, right? It goes up to the levels beyond mine drainage to the way that nuclear power was harnessed in war. How does this legacy of pollution and of really destructive uses of nuclear power intersect with the work as you do it now and possibly even thinking about, like you were starting to say, cleanup or mitigation in these systems?

Travis Olds 28:47

Yeah, so there are techniques in place to do this and it's done successfully. Not currently in the US, there is no federally mandated disposal site. There is one, it's called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. It's a salt, old salt mine. Basically what they're doing is they're taking some of the, it's not waste from a nuclear reactor, it's waste from these kind of legacy processes. So they bring it into the mine, and over time this salt just creeps and it kind of entombs it, and it prevents water from flowing. So that's one of the best places to be able to do deep geological repository storage type things. That's one of the best ways to deal with a lot of the legacy waste, because it's just waste. Other countries like France reprocess their waste, so specifically from nuclear reactors, and because this is a plutonium proliferation problem, the US doesn't reprocess the fuel, but fuel from a nuclear reactor is actually spent fuel or used fuel, it actually contains something like 90 plus percent of the original fissile usable material in it, and you can reprocess that to get it back. But the U.S. doesn't do that because it creates a plutonium waste stream and that could potentially be stolen, interdicted, used for a bomb.

Michael Pisano 30:16

Bombs, fallout, meltdown, mutually assured destruction. These horrors haunt our psyches, policies, and cultures like heavy metals in the water supply. I wonder if this trauma is why we invest so heavily in the pursuit of security, in doomsday stockpiles, and destructive potential. But does hoarding resources and weapons make us any less scared? Does it make us any safer? It's easy to see what's scary about nuclear power. Who hasn't jolted awake at 3am, paralyzed by the cold, sweaty certainty of impending annihilation? Or perhaps the greater fear is of people who might wield atomic weapons, the fear of some unshakable inherent human brutality. At this point of the Anthropocene, 75 years after that thin blanket of plutonium particles settled into the Earth's sediments, I'm more concerned with the fear of moving on, the fear of letting go, of breaking from tradition, of making change. At 3 a.m., my paralysis demon leans down and whispers: Are Americans afraid of creation? The uranium on our planet was created billions of years ago in interstellar collisions and supernovae. The uranium atoms in our reactors predate the formation of the Earth. You'd be right to cower at the destructive scale and force of such cosmic catastrophes. But also, these are acts of creation. These events are the forges that create the elements that make up our universe, which itself was created in an even bigger and less conceivable bang.

Michael Pisano 32:00

Decaying uranium heats the interior of the planet below your feet. This radioactive energy drives the plate tectonics and volcanism that created the conditions for the origin of life on Earth. 400 million years ago, nuclear fusion in our sun created energy that was absorbed by plankton on a shallow inland sea. Countless generations of plankton grew and died and sank and were entombed in stone, as eventually the sea itself perished in a slow-motion tectonic plate collision. This collision formed the Appalachian Mountains. Much more recently, humans shot a pressurized stream of chemicals deep underground to retrieve the plankton, which in the intervening hundreds of millions of years had been transmuted by heat and pressure and time into oil and gas. When we burn the oil and gas, we release the energy of the sun gathered by the plankton 400 million years ago. That ancient solar power has fueled the exponential growth spurts of the Great Acceleration. It's incredible, and perhaps impossible, or at least humbling, to imagine the billions of years over which these processes unfold. The aging of stars, the agglomeration of elements into new planets, the evolution of life on Earth. It's incredible to see what humans have done in the last 75 years. The elemental, primordial powers we have learned to wield. The resulting cascade of discoveries, an accelerating chain of reactions between humans and planet that have created new minerals and new elements, unlocked and unleashed massive amounts of energy. Over the past 75 years, we have manifested miracles and experimented with destruction approaching cosmic scale.

Michael Pisano 34:06

As we're kind of, you know, moving away from fossil fuels as we have to, I wonder what you both think about the role of nuclear energy and where you would hope to see it go next.

Travis Olds 34:18

I'll be frank. I think nuclear power is probably the only replacement for base load power. So something that can power on your lights any time of the day. And that's currently what they use natural gas or coal for. And so replacing that, which needs to happen, needs to come from a combination of either a bulk of it nuclear that can provide a consistent power base, or if batteries and storage of energy can become more advanced, things like solar, wind can boost that.

Michael Pisano 34:50

Where does that take you?

Nicole Heller 34:52

This is a huge issue, right? I mean, energy is one of the biggest sources of carbon dioxide and methane emissions. So kind of reducing fossil fuel use is essential. And like Travis says, you know, that's really challenging because we've depended so much on the kind of power of fossil fuels and how sort of they've been relatively cheap and easy. You can turn your lights on in the middle of the night and all these sort of benefits. And so looking toward a net zero future, right? How are we going to get ourselves off fossil fuels in the next 25 years, which is really, that's the commitments that countries around the world have made. And to get on track to this net zero energy future by 2050 is essential. And in those analysis, nuclear is always part of that portfolio. But there's a lot of debate around this, right?

Michael Pisano 35:44

What are some of the concerns that you hear about nuclear?

Nicole Heller 35:47

I mean, the ones that I grew up on, right, are the safety issues and the waste issues. And Fukushima was just a few years ago, right? And we saw the crisis that happens from one of these reactors melting down. But then there's also the waste issue. And, you know, I don't fully understand if we're solving that in a safe way.

Travis Olds 36:11

No, all of the waste of most nuclear reactors just sits on site nowadays. And that's not a solution to the problem. We've been relying on very old nuclear reactors for so long. And there have been so many advances made in this technology, especially with regards to safety.

Michael Pisano 36:31

Sure. What would you say to someone who's nervous? What do you wish they would know about nuclear power and those advancements that you mentioned of how we can do it more safely?

Travis Olds 36:44

Yeah, so one of the big improvements are these things called small modular reactors. They're about some fraction of the size of Fukushima or Chernobyl. Very small, can power a whole city and be done safely.

Michael Pisano 36:58

Am I hearing, and this is complete kind of speculation, but advancements have maybe been difficult to make in renewables in some cases because of, you know, existing interest in the fossil fuel infrastructure that we already have, entrenchment in the status quo of energy production. Is that similar, do you think, to the lack of, or one of the factors in the lack of progress?

Travis Olds 37:20

It's policy, again. It's , you know, dependent on our government to actually make the decisions to do some of these things. And part of it is public opinion, you know, a lot of people are afraid and they don't want this. I think a lot of people want it done right, but a lot of people are still afraid.

Michael Pisano 37:52

Humans are amazing. Every day, humans work together to cure diseases, win lawsuits against polluters, and solve problems of sustainable energy. We've spent 300,000 years practicing altruism and cooperation. It can be easy to lump all humanity into some moral dumpster full of villainy and apathy, to consider our species as some blight on an innocent planet. Our history can sometimes read that way, but we're all learning to think critically and think twice about who wrote the official histories. The same goes for natural history. Some very popular natural history books interpret the story of life as driven by competition and brutality. This is not the only interpretation, nor the most convincing. Without the microbes in our guts, without fungi in the soil, without photosynthesizers and pollinators and innumerable interspecies interdependencies, life would scarcely stand a chance. We need each other. Homo sapiens is a dominating force because of our remarkable ability to collaborate and cultivate and care. Dominance so far has not gone particularly well. We may have gone a little overboard with the coal and the oil and the uranium, but these ancient substances are not inherently destructive, and neither are humans. Fossil fuels are the raw material for countless life-saving tools. They cook our food, heat our homes, drive our cars, and made the roads we drive them on. Meanwhile, their extraction destroys places, lives, and ways of life. They're filling the world with greenhouse gases and toxic pollutants that threaten everything on Earth's existence. The destructive force of fossil fuels has come to outweigh what it creates, so it's time to change. It's time for humans to embrace our creative side and boldly support new alternatives. And these alternatives already exist. Nuclear, solar, and batteries are improving every day, illuminating new visions of a livable future. All three have obstacles to overcome, nothing's perfect, but we're out of time to spend wringing our hands over old fears. The inherited fear of destructive potential, or fear that the apocalypse is unavoidable and perhaps even deserved because humans have been bad. We deserve firestorms and hurricanes and pandemics as reprisal. This is a convenient cover story for doing nothing to ease the suffering of fellow Earthlings today and in the future. You know what I fear? A life caught up in the speed of the great acceleration, a passive ride on a runaway train, accepting helplessness. A next world is coming whether we are active in its creation or not. Trying won't be easy, but it will be worth it. The sooner we stop extracting and burning fossil fuels, the more suffering we will prevent, the more lives we will save. That alone seems a good enough reason to reinvest oil and gas subsidies in better, sustainable alternatives. But also, in solving these hard problems that aren't going away, we have an amazing opportunity to pursue health, community, and happiness. We won't heal from the traumas of the Anthropocene by scraping the last fossil fuels out of the Earth, exploiting each other, or loading a bunker with bullets and beans. You don't heal from old wounds by preparing for the prospect of a next attack. The antidote to destruction is creation.

Nicole Heller 41:42

I would suppose I'm more hopeful for kind of system level change that will facilitate this transition so that when we go to plug in we don't have to think about it. What's coming out is clean, right? Because it's really hard to see the change happening at the scale it needs to happen just through individual behavior. At the same time, I am interested in what I think you're also pointing to though is about like distributed energy sources and taking advantage of the energy that's all around us. I mean, I just think about like how fundamental energy extraction is to being a creature right it's something every creature does right? And it's so, there's so many ways to do it and so it does seem like it seems like there's this great opportunity to just tap into more varied ways of making energy when you think about it in a more distributed manner, more of a kind of distributed sort of village scale.

Michael Pisano 42:52

A little bit of a solar punk future, right? Everybody's got a solar panel on their backpack and their hover skateboard is also powered by that. I mean, I think we're kind of getting in some ways back towards this idea of the great acceleration and the kind of dynamics that define this kind of progress that we have been making progress. And in some ways, I think the conversation about sustainable energy futures often gets hung up on just novel technologies or on retrofitting or improving. And that's obviously important. It's a huge part of phasing out fossil fuels. But this discourse, I think, can overshadow maybe some of the cultural perspectival shift stuff also about reining in that infinite growth paradigm and just the idea of maybe using less energy, designing systems to use less energy culturally, finding value in that, perhaps broadly doing less. So I guess I wonder what you both think of ideas of deceleration or de- growth?

Nicole Heller 43:57

Yeah, no, that's a, that's a, I mean, it's a good analogy, right? This period has been just acceleration, right? Like so much new technology and so much change and, and like policies and regulations aren't always keeping up with the rate of change and, or they get sort of stuck. Yet we kind of continue to keep accelerating and changing. And I mean, we feel that right all the time with like every day you open up the paper, it's like a new thing. Okay. AI is coming on. Like what does AI and artificial intelligence mean? How might that transform some of these debates? How might that contribute to sustainable energy? And I think deceleration, I mean, it's a great... a great question. Often when we say things like that, people get a little like, they don't like that. They say like, I don't wanna go back to eating nuts and berries, you know? But like, I think there's a, but at the same time, like we're all pretty harried, you know, we're frustrated. I think people are frustrated with the pace of life. So maybe there's like, maybe slowing down a little in many, many ways could really improve our wellbeing.

Michael Pisano 45:16

400 million or so thanks to Nicole and Travis for inviting us into the Carnegie's mineralogy collection and to the many items there- in for lessons in creation, destruction, and wonder. We Are Nature is produced by Nicole Heller and Sloan MacRae. It's recorded at Carnegie Museum of Natural History by Matt Unger and Garrick Schmidt. DJ Thermos makes the music. Mackenzie Kimmel describes the collection items. And Garrick Schmidt and Michael Pisano, that's me, edit the podcast. Thanks for listening.