Atoms for Prosperity | Indiana Century S1E5

The nuclear power your parents feared and the nuclear power we're building are related in name only.

In Episode 5 of The Indiana Century Podcast, host Kory Easterday kicks off the deep dive on Pillar 1: Energy Sovereignty. This is an honest look at why nuclear, why now, and why Indiana is perfectly positioned to lead.

You'll learn:

🔥 The fire we're all standing in – Why getting off fossil fuels isn't optional, and why renewables alone can't do the job at our current consumption levels.

📊 The economics nobody talks about – Drawing on the groundbreaking "Chasing Cheap Nuclear" research by Jessica Lovering and Jameson McBride, we break down the trade-off between scaling and learning. Why the first SMR will be expensive. Why the 50th will be cheaper than coal. And why South Korea is the model we need to copy.

☢️ The waste opportunity – The $15 billion Yucca Mountain failure. 95,000 tons of stranded spent fuel. $62 billion in federal liability. And how Indiana can turn America's mistake into our revenue stream.

⚠️ The risks, honestly addressed – What radiation actually is. What really happened at Chernobyl. Why meltdowns can't happen in modern SMR designs. And a preview of deeper dives to come.

✏️ Nuclear 101 (whiteboard edition) – Atom splits, heats water, makes steam, spins turbine, makes electricity. That's it. That's the whole thing.

Featured Research: "Chasing Cheap Nuclear" by Jessica Lovering & Jameson McBride (2020)
Featured Book: Atomic Awakening by James Mahaffey

If you've ever wondered whether nuclear can be safe, affordable, and ours, this episode is for you.

Sovereignty isn't given. It's built.

IndianaCentury.org

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Episode five. Adams for Prosperity.

SPEAKER_03 0:06

Counties in Indiana were among the hardest hit after nearly 36 hours of steady rain. What springs right now, head west. If you're in places like California, Arizona, or Texas, it's not just warm this weekend. It feels like May, even June. And yes, records are in play. We just set a preliminary U.S. winter record high of 106 degrees in Falcomdown, Texas, on Thursday in February.

SPEAKER_04 0:44

In the Texas panhandle, two large wildfires have burned more than 20,000 acres combined now. Indiana is being affected too.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Everything is connected. Something that happens far away affects everyone, and it affects people very quickly. So there's no way to escape this. There's no way to run away from it or ignore it.

Part 2 - Renewable Energy

Part 3 - Why Nuclear

Part 4 - The Waste Opportunity

Part 5 - The Market Opportunity

Part 6 - The Risks of Nuclear Power

SPEAKER_02 1:12

Part 1. The fire. Let's start with something we don't talk about enough. Not because we don't know it, but because knowing it and doing something about it are two very different things. The planet is on fire. Not metaphorically, actually on fire. Right now as we're recording this. There are places burning that have never burned before. There are people drowning in floods that were supposed to happen once every 500 years, now happening for the third time in a decade. I'm not here to give you a lecture on climate change. You've already heard it. You know the numbers, you know the 1.5 degree threshold that we just blew past, by the way. You know about the droughts that are drying up the Mississippi, you know about the farmers who can't plant because the ground won't cooperate, or the ones who can't harvest because the rain won't stop. Here's what you might not know. In 2024, climate-related disasters killed an estimated 20,000 people worldwide. Heat-related deaths are over 175,000 per year. Displaced, 26.4 million people. It cost the global economy over$300 billion. And those are just the ones that we can count. The ones we can't count are the people who died from heat they couldn't escape, the kids whose asthma got worse because the air got dirtier, the families who lost their farms to the slow grind of weather patterns that used to work and don't anymore. Heck, we used to have stable weather, which meant meteorologists could predict your local weather with precision 10 to 15 days out. Now we're lucky if tomorrow's forecast is accurate. This change happened in my lifetime. This is not a future problem, it is a now problem. The question isn't whether we need to get off fossil fuels, the question is how fast can we do it without tearing everything down in the process. We need to replace every power plant that burns coal, every plant that burns gas, and every furnace that burns oil. Not someday, soon, like yesterday soon if we're being honest. And we need to do it while keeping the lights on, keeping the factories running, keeping the hospitals open, keeping the still mills hot. We need to do it while the planet is getting hotter and demanding more cooling. We need to do it while the economy keeps growing and demanding more power, not less. That's the challenge. That's the box that we are currently in. So let's take a look at the tools we have. We need to do it while the economy keeps growing and demanding more power, not less. That is the challenge. That is the box we are currently in. So let's take a look at the tools we have to get out of it. Part two. Renewable energy. Here's some good news. Indiana is already building renewables. Centerpoint Energy projects they'll have about 1,000 MW of renewable power generation availability by 2026. AES Indiana just activated the Petersburg Energy Center in Pike County. That's 250 MW of solar plus 180 MW hours of battery storage. EDP Renewables just turned on River Start Solar 4 in Randolph County. Another 150 MW, powering nearly 29,000 homes. Altogether, EDP Renewables alone now operates 2 GW of wind and solar in Indiana. That's the equivalent of powering more than 527,000 homes. Wind, solar, batteries, it's already happening right here in Indiana. Renewables are great, they're clean, they're getting cheaper, they create jobs, they don't pollute. We should build as much of them as we possibly can. But here's the part that doesn't make it into the brochures. Solar panels don't work at night. Wind turbines don't spin when the air is still. Batteries can store power for a few hours, but not for days. Definitely not for weeks. Not when you get a stretch of cloudy, calm weather in January, and everybody's trying to heat their homes. I am currently employed with Eton Corporation. I am a customer support engineer in the Power Quality Division. I work on these big battery systems that back up anything from colleges to military bases to steel mills, so I am intimately familiar with battery technology. And I will tell you, batteries can help, and they will get better in the future. When the sun's shining and the wind is blowing, you store that energy. Then release it when conditions change. That works great for a few hours, even a day, but here's what many people don't realize. First, those batteries require lithium, cobalt, and other rare minerals, often mined in ways that are environmentally destructive and ethically questionable. Second, even if we solved that, current technology can't store enough energy to power a city through a week of gray January weather, let alone an industrial economy running twenty four seven. Batteries are a bridge, not a destination. I believe we'll invent sufficient storage solutions, but we aren't quite there yet. Gravity batteries look like they'll have a great potential, and flow batteries are promising for grid scale storage, but we're still years away from the kind of seasonal storage that would let renewables carry the full load. And here is another part they don't tell you about. Solar panels wear out. The good ones last about twenty five to thirty years. Then what? Right now, most of them end up in landfills. We're not being responsible, we don't have any kind of plan to recycle these. But the materials can be recycled. The glass, the aluminum, the silicon. But it's not profitable. Private companies won't do it because there's no money in it. So who's going to handle it? The same people who handle every other job that's necessary, but not profitable. The public. The state Us. If Indiana builds out renewables at scale, we're also building a future waste problem. Tens of thousands of tons of solar panels coming due in the 2040s and 2050s. That's not a reason to avoid renewables. It's a reason to plan ahead. We can build solar panel recycling hubs staffed by ICC workers. We can create a maintenance workforce that keeps those panels running at peak efficiency. We can turn a future liability into a permanent job creating asset. That, after all, is what sovereignty looks like. Not just building things, but owning the whole life cycle. And here's where it gets uncomfortable. If we wanted to, we could power Indiana entirely with renewables. It would require massive changes. We'd have to lower our power consumption way down. We'd have to tell the still mills they can't operate at night, tell the manufacturers they need to shut down during peak demand. Tell people to stop using their air conditioning in July and their heat in January. To me, that's not a solution, that's a fantasy. Nobody's going to vote for that. Nobody's going to accept that. And frankly, nobody should have to. Because here is the truth. We can keep our quality of life. We can keep our factories running, we can keep our homes warm in the winter and cool in the summer. We can do all of that and still get off fossil fuels. But we can't do it with solar and wind alone. At least not in the next several decades. We need something else. Something that runs all night, something that works in any weather, something that can power a steel mill and a hospital at the same time without producing carbon. We need nuclear. Part three. Why nuclear There's a paper I want to tell you about. It's called Chasing Cheap Nuclear, written in 2020 by Jessica Lovering and Jameson McBride. Lovering is a physicist who's done some of the best work on nuclear economics. McBride is a policy researcher. Together, they wrote what I consider the most important document on the future of nuclear power. Here's the question they set out to answer. Can a small modular reactor ever be cheap? And if so, how? Their answer surprised me, and it might surprise you too. For decades the nuclear industry believed in economies of scale. Build a bigger reactor, and the cost per unit of power goes down. That works for pipelines. It works for warehouses, but for nuclear, not so much. Lovering and McBride dug into the data from eight countries going back decades. What they found is that the United States, in particular, built reactors so complex that bigger didn't mean cheaper. It actually meant more expensive. More custom engineering, more regulatory uncertainty, more delays. And here's the insight. Build the same thing over and over and over again in a factory. Each unit teaches you something. The tenth unit costs less than the first. The fiftieth costs less than the tenth. That's the trade off. Scaling versus learning. Bigger versus more. Small modular reactors bet on learning. Lovering and McBride actually give you the formula. I'm not going to read it to you, it's full of exponents and variables. But here's what it means in plain English. If learning rates hit fifteen to twenty percent, small reactors reach cost parity with large reactors after twelve to twenty units. If learning rates hit twenty five percent, which is what solar panels have already achieved, parity comes after four to eight units. It's not a guess, it's just math based on decades of data from every energy technology we have ever built. And there's one country that proves this works. South Korea. Lovering and McBride's data shows that South Korea is the only country in the world with statistically significant positive learning in nuclear construction. They built the same design at the same sites with the same workforce, over and over. And guess what? Costs went down and quality went up. They are the gold standard. What did they do differently? They didn't have to innovate, they just standardized. They didn't chase bigger reactors, they built the same small reactor again and again until they got really good at it. That is the model. Not innovation, repetition, not prototypes, production lines. Now let me be straight with you. The first small modular reactor in Indiana will be expensive, maybe twice as expensive per kilowatt as a natural gas plant. Lovering and McBride quantify this. If you scale down the cost of a large reactor, the first small unit could cost anywhere from nine thousand eight hundred to fifty six thousand dollars per kilowatt. That is a huge range, and the high end is ridiculous. Nobody's paying fifty six thousand dollars per kilowatt. But here's what that range tells us. First of a kind costs are highly uncertain. Nobody really knows what the first factory built reactor will cost until we build it. What we do know is what happens after that. Lovering and McBride show that with enough unity, costs come down. Did you know solar panels started at$100,000 per kilowatt in the 1970s? Today, they're under two thousand dollars. Jet engines followed the same curve, so did every manufacturing industry in history. The question isn't is the first one cheap? It's do we have the patience and the policy to capture that learning curve? Here's where our plan comes in. We're not building dozens of different reactor designs. We're picking one. I prefer the GE Hitachi BWRX 300, and we would build it up to 50 times. Same design, same workforce trained through the ICC, same regulatory path with early permits from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the same sites. Purdue, Grissom, Crane, or a standardized energy park. That is the South Korea model. That's how you capture learning effects. Lovering and McBride's math say that if we do this right, we could see cost parity as few as four units. And that's in our first phase of construction. That's Purdue plus three more. After that, it's downhill. The tenth unit is cheaper than the fifth, the twentieth is cheaper than the tenth. And by the fortieth, it will be cheaper than coal. And here's where it gets really interesting. Lovering and McBride project that if just 25% of worldwide new nuclear capacity comes from small amount modular reactors by 2050, that it would be 2,560 megawatt reactors or 100,000 1.5 megawatt micro reactors. That's enough volume to drive costs down to compete with fossil fuels globally. Indiana's piece of that is up to 50 reactors. That's only 2% of the global market. But the factory we build to make those 50, that factory can make the next 500 for export. Once the line is running, we sell to Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, hell, to Europe if we want. The first fifty are for us, the next 500 are for export. That's the Indiana Century Industrial Strategy. Part four. The Waste Opportunity. Let me tell you a story about America's$15 billion mistake. In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The federal government promised to take responsibility for the nation's spent nuclear fuel. They promised to build a permanent repository. They promised to start accepting waste by 1998. In nineteen eighty seven, Congress picked a site, Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Remote, dry, geologically stable. They spent fifteen billion dollars studying it, drilling into it, testing it. It became one of the most studied pieces of geology on Earth. And then politics happened. Nevada didn't want it. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, made Killing Yucca Mountain a personal mission. In twenty ten, President Obama pulled the plug.$15 billion down the drain, no permanent repository, and no plan B. Today, there are more than ninety-five thousand metric tons of spent nuclear fuel sitting at seventy-nine temporary storage sites across the country, at seventy-three commercial power plants, at university labs, at government facilities, spread across thirty nine states. And here's the kicker. The federal government is paying for its failure. They're paying nuclear utilities six hundred million to eight hundred million dollars every year in damages because they promised to take the waste and didn't. The total liability by twenty thirty is approaching sixty two billion dollars. This is insane. We're paying billions of dollars to not solve a problem that's already solved. The technology exists, the geology exists, the money exists. What's missing is political will. Here is where Indiana comes in. In january twenty twenty six, the Department of Energy issued a request for information asking states to volunteer to host nuclear life cycle innovation campuses. These would be facilities that handle the full fuel cycle, fabrication, enrichment, and recycling. It would also include waste disposition. The federal government is finally admitting that the old model, pick one site, fight about it forever, get absolutely nothing done, simply doesn't work. The new model is voluntary. States that want to participate can. States that don't simply won't. Indiana should be the first in line. Here is what Indiana would get out of it. First, we need to get off fossil fuels. Nuclear gives us a path. Second, we have the fifth largest manufacturing economy in the country. We make things here. Things require power. Lots of power all the time, reliably. Nuclear gives us that. Third, we have our own spent fuel to store already. We've been generating nuclear waste here in Indiana from medical isotopes, from research reactors, from industrial uses. It's all sitting somewhere. We should be responsible for it. We should store it for ourselves safely and permanently. Fourth, if we store our own fuel, we can store other people's fuel too. For a fee. The federal government is desperate to solve this problem. They will pay. The utilities are desperate to get rid of this liability. They'll pay. We can turn America's sixty two billion dollar mistake into Indiana's revenue stream. The fifth part is the part that gets me the most excited, and that's the fact that spent fuel is fuel. Current generation reactors only use about 5% of the fuel that is in their fuel rods. Once that's used, the fuel just has to be stored as spent nuclear fuel. However, modern reactors, the next generation, can actually use the other 95% of that fuel rod as fuel. The technology exists, we just haven't deployed it here. If Indiana builds the full fuel cycle, fabricating fuel rods, recycling them, and feeding them into advanced reactors, we can take what's currently A three hundred thousand year disposal problem and turn it into a three hundred year manageable project. It's not solved forever, but it's managed responsibly. Part 5. The market opportunity. Here is where Lovering and McBride's numbers get really exciting. They project that if just 25% of new nuclear energy capacity comes from small modular reactors by 2050, that that is enough volume to drive down costs to compete with fossil fuels. It's enough volume to create a global industry. Indiana's piece of that is up to 50 reactors, which is only 2% of the global market. But the factory we build to make those 50, that factory can make the next 500 for export. Once the line is running, we sell to other states or other countries. The first fifty are for us, the next fifty are for export. Think about what that means. A manufacturing industry that didn't exist yesterday, built here, employing Hoosiers, exporting to the world, not extracting from us, building with us. That is sovereignty. Lovering and McBride also lay out the policy tools that work. Let me run through them real quick. Direct government procurement that's Purdue's first reactor, funded by cannabis revenue, by federal grants, by the Bank of Indiana. Treat it as a research and development unit, not a commercial investment. Capture the learning. Document everything. Loan guarantees for manufacturing facilities. That is the Bank of Indiana lending at three to four percent to build the factory. Not demanding quarterly returns, it's instead patient capital. The kind that lets you invest in the future instead of extracting for the quarter. Next are the federal power purchase agreements. That's the state, the counties, the municipal utilities committing to buy the power. A guaranteed customer, certain revenue. That's what lets vendors set up factories here in Indiana. And the last tool that they mention is streamlined licensing. That's partnering with the NRC early, getting design certification, getting early site permits, locking in the regulatory path for all 50 units, so we're not reinventing the wheel every single time. Vendors need orders for tens of reactors to justify building a factory here. Boeing lines up hundreds of orders before the first plane rolls off the line. We're committing to up to 50, and that is enough. Now let's talk about the risks because they are real, and if we're going to do this, we need to be honest about them. Let us start with the elephant in the room. Yes, it's real. Some of the isotopes in spent nuclear fuel remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. That's not a joke, it's simply the science of atoms. But here's what the number doesn't tell you. It's not glowing green sludge, it's solid ceramic pellets sealed inside metal rods, packed inside massive concrete and steel casks. It doesn't move, it doesn't dissolve in water, it doesn't explode. It just sits there, getting less radioactive every year. The challenge isn't the waste itself. The challenge is keeping it away from people and the environment for a very long time. That's a solved problem. Deep geological repositories, mines essentially dug into stable rock formations, can isolate waste for millions of years. Finland is building one right now. It will open next year. On the nuclear submarine that I served on, I slept in a rack that was about fifty feet from a big operating nuclear reactor. Fifty feet. Every day we would walk over it back to the engine room where we worked. We ate our meals about a hundred feet forward of it, and like everyone on board, I wore a TLD, which is a little badge that measures exactly how much radiation you're exposed to. And here's the funny thing. When we were underway, reactor running, powering the whole boat, our badges showed that we received less radiation than if we had been on land. Less than from a day working in the sun. Less than from eating a banana. Which brings me to the basics. Radiation is energy traveling through space. Some of it comes from the sun. Some comes from the ground, some comes from bananas. Seriously, bananas contain potassium forty, a radioactive isotope. You eat radioactive food all the time, and you probably had no idea. In fact, we'd regularly get scanned at medical facilities, and they could always tell if we ate a banana that morning, because they could see a spike in potassium forty. You're radioactive right now. So is your dog, your grandmother. It's completely normal. So how is it possible that I got less radiation sleeping fifty feet from a reactor for years than I would have on land? Because we understand what radiation is and how to shield it. Water shields it. That's why we weren't receiving radiation from the sun while we're underneath the ocean. Steel shields it, lead, concrete. On a submarine we had thousands of tons of ocean water around us, and we understand the difference between radiation and contamination. Radiation is like the light from a light bulb. It's there when the bulb is on, gone when it's off. Contamination is radioactive dust on your hands, for example, and that's what we trained to prevent. We had procedures, monitoring, and a culture where safety was the only priority. The Navy figured this out seventy years ago. They've operated hundreds of nuclear reactors on submarines, on aircraft carriers, without a single accident that harmed the public. Not one. That's the culture we are importing to Indiana. That's the training the Indiana Sentry Corps will receive. So when I say we can build these safely, I'm not guessing. I can tell you what I lived. Now there's a question that comes up every time I talk about nuclear power, and I want to address it directly. Someone's going to hear uranium and think bomb. That's not crazy. That's what we were all taught during the Cold War. But here's the thing you need to know. Reactor fuel and weapons material are not the same thing. They can never be the same thing. Think of it like this the log in your fireplace and the charcoal in your grill are both made from wood. Same starting material, but you can't sear a steak over a campfire the way you can with charcoal, and you can't heat your home with a bag of briquettes. Different processing, different concentration, different purpose. The uranium that goes into a power reactor is about 3% to 5% enriched in a particular isotope called uranium 235. That means the other ninety-five percent of our fuel is a stable kind, uranium-238, which won't sustain a chain reaction. It's like firewood, good for steady, reliable heat. The uranium that goes into a nuclear weapon needs to be ninety percent enriched or higher. That's the charcoal, highly concentrated for an intense, specific purpose. You can't turn firewood into charcoal without a completely different process. And you can't turn reactor fuel into weapons material without a massive, obvious, internationally monitored industrial facility, the kind that would be immediately noticed by everyone from the IAEA to your next door neighbors. The United States has been operating civilian nuclear reactors for over sixty years. Thousands of tons of fuel have been through those reactors. None of it has ever become a bomb. Not once, not ever. So when someone tells you nuclear power leads to nuclear weapons, ask them. Show me where it's happened. In seven decades of commercial nuclear power in over thirty different countries, it hasn't. Not once. Because the two things are fundamentally different, and we know how to keep them that way. This brings us to Chernobyl, because everyone knows that name. And everyone should know what actually happened.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

The Soviet version is this one of the atomic reactors at the Chernobyl atomic power plant near the city of Kiev was damaged, and there is speculation in Moscow that people were injured and may have died. The Soviets may have been fairly quick to acknowledge the accident because evidence in the form of mild nuclear radiation had already reached beyond the Soviet borders to Scandinavia.

Part 7 - How Nuclear Power Works

Part 8 - The 50th Reactor

SPEAKER_02 32:31

A test gone wrong. A reactor design that was fundamentally unsafe. No containment building, graphite moderator that could catch fire, that means the cooling liquid that they used for their reactor was able to catch on fire. The operators intentionally disabled safety systems. They pushed the reactor into a configuration that should have never been allowed. The result? Explosions, fire, massive release of radioactive material. The death toll 30 workers died within weeks from acute radiation sickness. Among the 600 workers on site, 134 received high doses and suffered radiation sickness. Over the years, more than 6,000 thyroid cancers have been reported in people exposed to radioactive iodine from contaminated milk. The total death toll from radiation? The United Nations Scientific Committee concluded that apart from the thyroid cancer increase, there is no evidence of major public health impacts attributable to radiation from Chernobyl. The vast majority of the cleanup workers received doses comparable to or only a few times higher than the annual natural background radiation that we all receive. I need to make this very clear. I am not trying to minimize Chernobyl. It was a catastrophe. It destroyed lives, contaminated land, caused immense suffering. But it was a catastrophe of a particular kind. One caused by bad design, bad management, and bad decisions, not by nuclear power itself. Now let's talk about 2025 climate deaths. This is harder to pin down because attribution is complicated, but the numbers are staggering. The World Health Organization estimates that starting at 2030, climate change will cause approximately two hundred fifty thousand additional deaths per year from heat stress, malaria, diarrhea, and malnutrition. That is per year. Every year. Air pollution from fossil fuels kills an estimated eight million people annually. Every year. More than Chernobyl's total estimated casualties every single week. I am not trying to argue that nuclear is risk free. I'm saying that for every energy source there are risks. The question is which risks we choose? And right now we are choosing the ones that are killing millions, and will kill more if we continue to use them and heat the planet. We are going to spend a lot more time on this topic later in the series. Let me give you a preview. Episode fifteen The Reactor in a Box We'll go deep on SMR technology, how they're built in factories, how they're safer, how they're cheaper when you build enough of them. Episode sixteen Navy Nuclear Safety Culture I will bring in a colleague from my Navy days to talk about what real safety culture looks like. Not some cheesy slogan on a poster, the actual discipline of operating nuclear reactors safely for decades. Episode seventeen Indiana's Geology for Nuclear We'll look at the ground beneath our feet, the faults, the bedrock, the water tables, the science of where you can and can't put a reactor or a storage facility. Episode eighteen The Fuel Frontier We talk about high assay low enrichment uranium, or Haliu, enrichment, fuel, fabrication, how we become the energy capital of the heartland. And in episode nineteen, waste as wealth, the deep dive on spent nuclear fuel, why it's not the problem you think it is, and how we can turn it into a revenue stream, how we can eventually consume it as fuel. Part seven How Nuclear Power Works. Alright, let's take a step back because nuclear sounds complicated, but it's not. Everything starts with an atom. Tiny little thing. Way too small to see. But inside it, there's energy. Lots of it. When you split the atom, and you can do that by just hitting it just right with a neutron, it releases energy. Heat. Lots of heat. That's what fission is. Splitting an atom, releasing heat. Now heat is useful. What do we do with the heat? We heat water, make it boil, make steam. Steam rises and expands. It wants to move. So we point that steam at a turbine, which is essentially a big fan blade. The steam pushes it and makes it spin. That spinning turbine is connected to a generator, and a generator is just a fancy word for something that turns motion into electricity. It's the same as a bike dynamo, just a lot bigger. Electricity comes out, goes to the grid, lights your house, powers your factory, charges your phone. Atom splits, creates heat, boils water, makes steam that turns turbines. The turbines spin a generator, which makes electricity. That's it. That's nuclear power in one sentence. The only difference between nuclear and a coal or gas plant is what makes the heat. In a coal plant we burn it, gas plant we burn it. Nuclear, we just split atoms. Everything after that is identical. So when someone tells you nuclear is scary or complicated, ask them which part the splitting, the boiling, the spinning, the making electricity? Because three of those four steps are the exact same that's used in every power plant in Indiana already. And if someone brings up the radiation, if they point at nuclear and say it's too dangerous, here's the question they need to answer. Why aren't they more vocal about the energy source that's actually killing people? The International Atomic Energy Agency tracks this stuff carefully. The number of deaths directly attributed to nuclear power in the entire history of the industry is thirty two. thirty two people over seven decades. Even if you count every indirect death, including Chernobyl and Fukushima, you're looking at around six thousand. Now let's look at fossil fuels. Coal alone kills millions every year through mining accidents, through respiratory diseases, through the particulate pollution that gets into your lungs, your heart, and even your brain. We're not talking about abstract risk. We're talking about entire ecosystems destroyed, mountains leveled, communities poisoned, oceans acidified. And yet nuclear is the one that scares people? So when someone says nuclear is dangerous, ask them, dangerous compared to what? Compared to the energy source that's actively killing our neighbors right now? Or compared to the one with a safety record that no other energy source can touch? This is not an argument for ignoring risk. It's an argument for proportionality. We should fear what actually hurts us. And on that measure, nuclear power is not the problem. It's the solution we have been too afraid to build. Let me bring this home with a story. There is a book called Atomic Awakening by James Mahaffey. He's a nuclear engineer who spent his career at Georgia Tech, and he wrote this book to tell the honest story of nuclear power, not the PR version, not the scare version. This is the real version. Nuclear power is a paradox of danger and salvation. How is it that the renewable energy source our society so desperately needs is the one we are most afraid to use. The American public's introduction to nuclear technology was manifested in destruction and death. With Hiroshima and the Cold War still ringing in our ears, our perception of all things nuclear is seen through the lens of weapons development. Nuclear power is full of mind-bending theories, deep secrets, and the misdirection of public consciousness, some deliberate, some accidental. The result of this fixation on bombs and fallout is that the development of a non-polluting renewable energy source stands frozen in time. Outlining nuclear energy's discovery and applications throughout history, Mahaffey's brilliant and accessible book is essential to understanding the astounding phenomenon of nuclear power in an age where renewable energy and climate change have become the defining concerns of the twenty first century. Mahafi makes a point that stuck with me. He says that the nuclear industry made a fatal mistake in the 1970s. They kept making reactors bigger instead of making them better. They thought economies of scale would save them, but bigger just ended up meaning more complicated, more expensive, and more prone to delay. The way we get cheap nuclear, Mahaffey argues, is the way we got cheap airplanes. Build the same thing over and over in a factory. Learn with each unit, drive costs down through repetition, and not through size. That's exactly what Lovering and McBride proved with data. Mahaffey saw it coming decades ago. He just didn't have the numbers yet. Now we do. Here's the honest truth. The first small modular reactor in Indiana will be expensive. Maybe twice as expensive as a natural gas plant. That is not a failure. That is the nature of a first-of-a-kind technology. The tenth will be cheaper. The 20th will be cheaper still. By the time we get to the 50th, it will be cheaper than coal. And by the 500th, built here and exported to the world, it will be cheaper than natural gas. The question is whether we have the patience to capture this learning curve. Imagine if Indiana had 25 years to build 50 reactors, if we had the workforce that never stops building, the Indiana Century Corps, trained in the discipline of the nuclear navy. Imagine if we had a bank that answers to us, not to Wall Street. Imagine if Indiana had a sovereign wealth fund that could invest in the future instead of extracting for the present. That is how you win. Not by being the cheapest on day one, by being the smartest on day one, and the cheapest on day 1000. We are currently standing in a fire. Fossil fuels are burning the planet, killing millions, displacing millions more, making life harder for everyone. We have tools to fight it. Renewables are part of the answer. A big part. We should build as much solar and wind as we can as fast as we can. But renewables can't do this alone. Not at our current consumption levels, not without sacrifices that nobody is willing to make. That leaves nuclear, not as a forever solution necessarily, but as a now solution. As the only carbon-free source that can run all night, all winter, in any weather for as long as we need it. And when we do it right, when we build 50 reactors, when we capture that learning curve, when we turn our waste into fuel. When we build the factory that builds the reactors. And remember, sovereignty isn't given, it's built.