937: Oliver Stone | Nuclear Now

937: Oliver Stone | Nuclear Now

[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:03] Oliver Stone: Chemical damage to our landscape all over the world from oil is huge. People don't admit it, they don't see it, and they go on about radioactive waste, which is the most supervised of all. And you can fit all the radioactive waste we've used up to date inside a Walmart. And it decays. Within 40 years, 99 percent of it is toxicity is gone.

[00:00:26] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks — from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional former jihadi, economic hitman, gold smuggler, extreme athlete, or music mogul.

[00:00:55] If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode Starter Packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation and cyber warfare, crime and cults, and more. They'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started.

[00:01:15] Today, we're talking nuclear power. We'll explore why it's a better alternative than wind, solar, and other green solutions, now that we're turning away from coal and oil a little bit here, especially in North America. This is a positive conversation, just like my previous conversation with Oliver Stone. Yes, some of his takes on Ukraine are rather questionable, in my opinion. We don't talk about any of that here. So if you're looking for ideological conflict, this is not going to be the right episode for you, especially since I happen to agree with him about nuclear.

[00:01:41] I like his takes on nuclear and that's what we're going to stick to talking about here today. And you know what, it's almost like people can disagree on something and then not somehow hate every other opinion or quality of that person. Amazing here in 2023. The last week of 2023, right?

[00:01:56] Alright, here we go with Oliver Stone.

[00:02:01] All right, so I appreciate you coming back to the show. I was surprised, actually, to see this documentary pop up. And I've been a fan of nuclear power, for some time. And I'm always surprised by the ridiculous, in my opinion, ridiculous amount of pushback that I get on this. And your documentary made it really clear that it's just about fear being drilled into us at an early age.

[00:02:24] Oliver Stone: Fear, yeah. Subconscious, horror films from the 50s, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. People conflate the bomb with nuclear power. It's a big difference. They don't understand that a bomb is an enriched uranium. Really enriched, up to 90 percent. And nuclear power is like two, three percent. So it's not even close. Takes a lot of work to make a bomb. Huge amount of work. And a dirty bomb is not radioactive the same way. So, it's all this so much sensationalism around it. I came to it as an observer from the outside. I didn't know much about it. I was vaguely against nuclear bower in the 70s, 80s because it made sense. Jane Fonda was for it — i mean against it. And Springsteen and Jackson Browne and Ralph Nader, people I admired. And I think they really believed what they were doing, because I don't want to get into it because — but they really were scared of it. And then all the environmental groups kicked in starting in 1970, with the Green peace, Friends of the Earth, which was one of the first groups. Friends of the Earth — they spread the stories about how dangerous radioactivity was. Based on the old Rockefeller report from the 1956 Rockefeller Foundation put out, they were highly for fossil fuels, I mean standard oil. They put out this report and 56 has said, any amount of radioactivity is harmful to the body.

[00:03:48] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:03:49] Oliver Stone: Which is not true. It's just not true. And scientifically, it's been debunked. It has many other myths, but it's continued into the subconscious process.

[00:03:57] Jordan Harbinger: We'll unpack a lot of that. I do want to sort of back up and find out how this all began. The beginning of the anti-nuclear movement, you say in the documentary — Earth Day 1970 pollution fears. It just seems — it looks a little bit like the Hollywood cause du jour. Like you mentioned, Jane Fonda was against it. It just took on a life of its own and it reminded me of — what was that? I'm sorry. I'm probably showing my age here. That concert, was it Live Aid? Where they were like, "We got to give all this stuff to Africa." And it turned out like, "Oh, that didn't do anything."

[00:04:27] Oliver Stone: Well, that was later, wasn't it? That was 1980s, I think.

[00:04:30] Jordan Harbinger: That was the 80s.Yeah. But this reminded me of that kind of same thing.

[00:04:34] Oliver Stone: Yeah, but it's — that was Ethiopia famine. The famine there.

[00:04:37] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:04:37] Oliver Stone: That was significant famine. And I think they did a lot of good, they raised a lot of money that sometimes charity gets confusing, you know? Because you try to do some good and you end up doing more harm than you do good. No, this is a 1970s movement and it came out of, you know, you could argue that it came from the World War II. The use of the nuclear discovery, which is amazing discovery, by the way. It's the foundation of the universe. It's one of the most powerful energies we ever had. Marie Curie in 1895 found it. It was a movie made with Greer Garson. You should see it. It's very interesting movie about what radioactivity really was in the beginning, and she saw the power of it. Enrico Fermi did Einstein. Did Einstein said, matter is energy. He understood this and he understood what nuclear could do. Fermi was able to control it in his experiments in Chicago. Enrico Fermi, the Italian nuclear scientist, he really did a great job of showing what uranium could be controlled. And that is the key. Because people are scared of, as I said earlier, enriched uranium is dangerous. No question about it. But the radiation in a nuclear energy facility is background radiation. It's lower level and it's not to be scared of. It's just to be handled correctly as you — Any toxic material in chemistry or all our industries are based, in some degree, on materials that are toxic. We have arsenic and lead and all kinds of cadmium, all kinds of poisonings that are going on. But if you handle this correctly, as it has been proven for 60 years now in the nuclear industry, you have no problem. You just handle it correctly. And that includes the waste too. It's no big deal.

[00:06:19] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. I think the problem is when you get all these demonstrations and you have these drills where you stick your head between your legs and go under your desk, you get scared and people don't think well when they are scared. One of the missions of this podcast is to unscare people, but the problem is that it's so much easier to scare people than it is to unscare people, and nuclear falls into that category.

[00:06:41] Oliver Stone: I know. Well, this is the nature of human life. The negative is always more damaging than the positive. Something comes out and you say something positive, "Oh, great, great." but then when you say something negative, it has more impact. This is true about movies too, you know. One bad review can spoil 10 good reviews. The negativity in mankind is a subject that we could talk about forever. I think, it runs through the human race. It's been my enemy for my life. It's cynicism. I didn't know anything about this subject. I came to it as a father and as a citizen. 1970s, it seemed like it was the right thing to do. But by the 2000s, when we started to hear about climate change, this became more mature as an idea. It became the idea that climate change is really happening because of fossil fuel poisoning. Fossil fuel, and that's coal and oil and gas. All the stuff that we put into the atmosphere, it's out there. That's the danger. That's the poison of the world. You invent an airplane, it crashes and you know, we can give up on airplanes and say, "We're never going to fly again."

[00:07:43] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:43] Oliver Stone: Same thing is true about anything that comes into being. There are downsides, but we always make the best of it. And that's what's happened with nuclear. We made the best of it. Eisenhower understood it, so did John Kennedy. They really pushed it. It would've been a nuclearized society by 2000-2020, in the United States anyway. And I think we would've led the rest of the world in adopting it. That was what was happening. Russia was also doing it and doing it very well, by the way. And they stayed with it. They didn't give it up, even after Chornobyl. So, Russia is a good example, as is China now. China has come into its own. And is building huge amounts of nuclear reactors. But they have too, are using a lot of coal.

[00:08:23] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, they're building coal too, unfortunately.

[00:08:25] Oliver Stone: Yeah. But at least they're on the right track. And they — President Xi has promised to go to net zero by 2060. And that's significant.

[00:08:32] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. He'll still be president then.

[00:08:34] Oliver Stone: Yeah. But listen, sometimes if you change administrations all the time and you have different policies like the United States has had, well, not with nuclear. It's true. But you can't just change policies all the time. That's part of the problem of so-called democracies. But with nuclear energy, it's been the same. We have Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden have all been pro-nuclear. But they haven't put the energy into it, the word-of=mouth, the symbolism of it. They've been scared off by all the alarmists.

[00:09:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:09:04] Oliver Stone: And the money. The costs factors in the United States are significant. Well, I'm not talking in the movie about just the United States, I'm talking about the world here.

[00:09:11] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:12] Oliver Stone: We're looking at an issue that is coming into being by 2050. There's going to be a demand for more and more electricity, which is about 2, 3, 4 times more. We're not ready for it.

[00:09:23] Jordan Harbinger: I know.

[00:09:23] Oliver Stone: Because most of the societies are poor, they're going to end up using more coal than even wood, if necessary.

[00:09:29] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That stuff terrifies me. By the way, the explanation in the movie or the documentary of the fuel used is really something, and I want to highlight this. An amount of uranium the size of the tip of your pinky finger, that amount of uranium is like $2 to mine. And I don't know how — what else they do. Do they enrich it? They pack it together into the imaginary pinky finger that I'm envisioning in my brain. And this uranium has the same energy as about a hundred dollars worth of coal, which is about a metric ton of coal. And I probably don't have to really describe how much more burning that coal pollutes than using that uranium.

[00:10:08] Oliver Stone: There's nothing like nuclear energy. Nothing like it in the world. It's got the most powerful thing of all. I don't — it's a gift from the gods. It's Prometheus. I mean, it's truly a gift of fire. The beauty of Fermi's experiment, you remember with the rods? He shows you how uranium can be controlled, and that got lost. It got lost in transition somewhere along the line. And ignorant people, a lot of them were good people. But they didn't know what they were talking about. Environmental groups. You know, one of the best moments in the film, I think, is when the co-founder of Greenpeace, Dr. Moore, comes on and he says, "You know, we got a lot of things right. Save the whales, stopping the bombs, cleaning up the concept of. But we got one thing wrong. It's nuclear energy." He says it very clearly. But many of his people have come along with it. There are people who have converted from environmentalists into pro-nuclear green environmentalists. But many of them have not, and they continue to be the green party in Europe. In Germany, for example, they closed out several nuclear reactors and they went back to fossil fuels. It was insane. And also United States, they closed it down, essentially. Not really completely, but they closed it down, essentially with the Three Mile Island incident and then Chornobyl incident in 1986, which was a genuine accident. But it's understandable and we know how — what happened. But there was no reason to run away. And we did, we basically froze in place. As did Japan after Fukushima and Korea.

[00:11:39] But now we're back on track. I think people are beginning to understand the polling in the United States. So 60 percent of the population is pro-nuclear.

[00:11:47] Jordan Harbinger: I'm glad to hear that.

[00:11:48] Oliver Stone: The problem is that money doesn't get there. I mean, there is money being put in, but they're still banking on renewables more, which is unfortunately very expensive. But nothing wrong with wind, nothing wrong with sun, but they don't work all the time.

[00:12:00] Jordan Harbinger: They don't work all the time. Yeah.

[00:12:01] Oliver Stone: And what do they use as a backup? They use —

[00:12:03] Jordan Harbinger: Coal. Yeah. Or oil. Yeah.

[00:12:05] Oliver Stone: Yeah. Gas. Yeah, mostly gas in the United States, which is methane. And that leaks all along the line. It goes up in the atmosphere. Very dangerous. Very dangerous and poisonous. Toxic. And then they talk about radioactive waste compared to the sh*t that's in the atmosphere. You have to always say, "Compared to what?"

[00:12:22] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:12:22] Oliver Stone: In anything.

[00:12:23] Jordan Harbinger: It's really amazing to look at those clips of those old videos where, "By the 21st century, everything will be nuclear powered. No emissions anywhere." And we still depend on fossil fuels for electricity. Well, sort of in the window where we were supposed to have electric cars, which we do. Look, the batteries may be mined by child slaves in Africa, we're working on that. But we still need the electricity in the first place, and that still comes from these dirty sources in part, and this is, I think, important to point out because oil companies decided this was going to be a huge threat. So they commissioned studies saying that any radiation was harmful, like you mentioned. Which by the way, background radiation is in nature everywhere. You can go in the middle of dead space and you're getting radiated by a star or a supernova or whatever. It just reminds me of those studies, Oliver, showing that cigarettes are healthy or this brand of cigarette is healthier than the other one.

[00:13:16] Oliver Stone: Oh, yeah, yeah.

[00:13:16] Jordan Harbinger: It's just sort of the inverse of that.

[00:13:18] Oliver Stone: Fossil fuel companies have a lot to be guilty of. I mean, they — who knows how much money they gave the environmental groups because we can't prove that because it's anonymous giving. But you know that they really — maybe it's competition and they just are ruthless. But they knew in their own studies that fossil fuels were going to screw up the planet. They knew that from the 1960s studies, 70s studies. We know it from the Chevron, Exxon. It's come out, you know, the papers are there. They knew what they were giving the world, and they kept going. And they're still going. They owe a lot. There's a very big problem ahead. But there will always be a place for oil. You can always make plastics and all kinds of stuff. They're not going to be run out of business. If they would lose a lot of their business, but they still managed to be important to many other industries. So it's not like they'd get wiped out.

[00:14:08] Jordan Harbinger: Greed is real. I mean, it's just — they probably thought, "Oh, we'll pivot into this." and then they went, "Why do that? We're making all this money." It's sort of, rather than just think of them as pure evil, I really do think that they get ahead of themselves and they think, "Oh, you know, we're going to do this our way." And it just never happens because they're —

[00:14:23] Oliver Stone: I think your analogy about the tobacco companies is correct and also the car companies. I mean, with the seat belts and all the Ralph Nader stuff about safety. They wanted the profit. And the safety factor, it always comes in second.

[00:14:35] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. There's this old clip of this guy being interviewed on the news and he says something like, "They're making us wear seat belts in cars and pretty soon, they're going to be making us do all this other stuff." And it's sort of like argues the slippery slope. Then fast forward, I think it was 20 years, there's a guy cracking a beer and he goes, "I can't believe they're not going to let us drink while we're driving. This is ridiculous. This is anti-American." And it's just like, if you think drinking and driving with no seatbelt is your car is the way to go, you might want to reexamine your beliefs on nuclear power as well, right?

[00:15:06] Oliver Stone: I remember in Texas when I was married to a Texas woman, and they used to drive around in the 70s with big jugs in the car. They at the car seat and the beer was in the container. Just driving. It was funny. Colt 45.

[00:15:21] Jordan Harbinger: It's so crazy to think about somebody driving with a 40 ounce of malt liquor just in the middle of the console. I can imagine the ads, "Now with larger cup holders to hold larger bottles of booze."

[00:15:31] Oliver Stone: The right to be American.

[00:15:32] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, the right to be American. Exactly.

[00:15:34] Oliver Stone: Well, actually, I was like that a bit. When I remember when Thomas Szasz, the philosopher, argued on TV in the 70s. He said, "You know, we have the right to kill ourselves." and he's right. Fundamentally, it's a libertarian right. If you want to commit suicide, you should. You could do it, you know? You know, you shouldn't be disallowed to take your own life.

[00:15:51] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:52] Oliver Stone: I believe strongly in right to die laws and I think we have to have more in this country, but that is an American Right. But killing yourself by killing others first —

[00:16:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I was going to say —

[00:16:01] Oliver Stone: is what's dangerous.

[00:16:02] Jordan Harbinger: If you fast forward on yourself and you have a reason, I understand. I don't want it fast forwarded on me because you were thirsty, on the way home from work.

[00:16:08] Oliver Stone: The same goes for smoking because the smoke hurts other people.

[00:16:15] Jordan Harbinger: You are listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Oliver Stone. We'll be right back.

[00:16:19] This episode is sponsored in part by BetterHelp. Our holiday traditions include the daily thrill of the advent calendar to teaching our children the value of generosity through sibling gift exchanges, doesn't always work. They're only to enforce. It's a little silly. This year's festivities are even more meaningful with my parents living just across the street, enriching our valued family time. But regardless of your family's gift giving customs, the holiday season is a perfect opportunity to nurture your self in your own unique way. Whether it's embarking on therapy, allowing yourself grace during challenging times, or indulging in a day of complete relaxation. Make sure to show yourself some love this holiday season. In the realm of self-care, therapy plays a vital role and BetterHelp provides an approachable path to mental health support. Imagine the convenience of engaging with a personal therapist right from your home, possibly while lounging in your holiday pjs. BetterHelp offers this deeply personal support — delivering insights and emotional assistance that often surpass what is found in usual family dynamics. Designed for your convenience, BetterHelp's online platform makes integrating therapy into your routine, effortless. Simply fill out a short questionnaire to connect with a licensed therapist. Switch therapists at any time. No extra cost.

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[00:18:01] All right, now back to Oliver Stone.

[00:18:05] That's how I look at the fossil fuel industry in many ways. And I am not saying there's no place for fossil fuels anywhere in the whole world or any petroleum products. I'm not trying to paint this as black and white. But when you look at the numbers, it just doesn't make sense. 4,000 deaths from Chornobyl — probably the largest nuclear disaster in history. 4,000 deaths from Chornobyl. That includes cancers down the line from exposure. 500,000 global deaths, annually, just from coal. It's not even close. And people are going to ask, "That doesn't even count outdoor air pollution from cars that kill something like 4 million people per year, so."

[00:18:43] Oliver Stone: Yeah. What about the waste from wells, oil wells and all the sh*t that they put in the air?

[00:18:47] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:18:48] Oliver Stone: Chemical damage to our landscape all over the world from oil is huge. People don't admit it, they don't see it. And they go on about radioactive waste, which is the most supervised of all.

[00:18:58] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:58] Oliver Stone: You can fit all the radioactive waste we've used up to date inside a Walmart. You know, it's highly supervised. And it decays within 40 years. 99 percent of it is toxicity is gone, and then it's buried in, as you know, concrete casts.

[00:19:13] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:19:13] Oliver Stone: Water. And then it's also underground. Finland and Sweden are doing remarkable achievements. Seen underground storage, putting it in. And we can do the same. The military has been doing that for years, too. Our military.

[00:19:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

[00:19:27] Oliver Stone: But in other words, we're making a big deal about it compared to what? What's climate change? That is horrible waste and it's ruining us.

[00:19:35] Jordan Harbinger: Indeed. People will say, and I kind of knee jerk reaction would also say, "Wow, well, every bit of nuclear waste is tracked by the industry and protected. I don't know. That still seems scary." Until you realize that the waste from coal and oil is in the air that you are breathing right now and is pumped out, essentially, haphazardly from every factory power plant and vehicle on the road. Even if factories and power plants have filters, your car really kind of doesn't scale down well.

[00:20:02] Oliver Stone: And methane gas pipelines.

[00:20:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:20:04] Oliver Stone: Pipelines leak all along the line.

[00:20:06] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:20:06] Oliver Stone: The leakage.

[00:20:07] Jordan Harbinger: From your stove, all the way back to the well that is leaking. And like you said, all the nuclear waste, all spent nuclear fuel from the United States, which is 20 percent of our energy generation, from what I understand. Over the last 60 years, all of that is what fits inside the Walmart that you mentioned before. So it's really just minuscule amount. I mean, the average human is thrown away, probably more crap over the course of their life, just in terms of plastic bags and stuff that's gone in their kitchen garbage than all of the nuclear fuel ever spent by the United states.

[00:20:38] Oliver Stone: Younger people like you are the ones who we're talking about. This conversation was not possible a few years ago. Now, I'm not an expert. I was — I believed that nuclear was bad when I was younger. People like Ralph Nader and Jane Fonda, I looked up to them and I still do. But the problem was that there was no consensus for nuclear. The lobbies were terrible. They didn't really advertise themselves. The only people that could have really said something were a scientists. And many of them didn't quite understand what it was. You know, Wyoming has its coal industry. Texas has its oil. They all have consensus. They have a following. It's very difficult for nuclear.

[00:21:15] That's why I wanted to make this film. This is one of the few films that talks about nuclear energy. If you could look at all the movies that are ever made from the beginning of time, they were horrible. All our movies, so the 50s I grew up with. Even up to X-Men, I mean everybo — you get bit by a radioactive spider, you become Spider-Man. It's bullsh*t. The whole thing. They make radioactivity into the most dangerous thing in the world and it scares people. That's what the movies have done. And they continued with Three Mile Island, what was it called? China Syndrome. China Syndrome and Silkwood. Don't forget Chernobyl, the HBO series in 2015. Scared the sh*t out around the world. They went seen by everybody. Again, vast exaggeration.

[00:21:57] We went to Russia to visit Rosatom. We got a lot of information from them. They're very good, Rosatom. That's a 250,000 man agency, men and woman agency. They do a lot of good work around the world. They export quite a bit. And they're probably the best in the world.

[00:22:13] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:22:13] Oliver Stone: France has an agency. China. You find that most of the best way to really approach nuclear is with some government, public control, public responsibility. Because we put it in the private hands of the United States. Westinghouse in General Electric. Westinghouse went bankrupt. General Electric is still doing it, but they make much more money from oil, coal, and the other things. So they built turbines and they built all the good stuff. And they have a small nuclear contingent. They're doing good stuff. They have a, what they call a small modular reactor coming up with Hitachi, the Japanese firm, and it'll be out on the market within three, four years. Looks good. Could be used very well, but it's still small. It's not producing the same kind of gigawatts that the big ones do, but it's still there. But it's all private, is what I'm trying to say.

[00:23:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:23:03] Oliver Stone: The government is — they have the Department of Energy in this country and they have helped a lot and all the presidents have been, the last four presidents, have been for it, from Bush on. But it's not really putting the amount of weight that we could do to make this happen on a big way.

[00:23:18] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Yeah. We have the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, but we don't have the same thing like Rosatom or France's Agency where it's just like, this is a priority for national security. It's just kind of — it more regulates and maybe, inhibits.

[00:23:32] Oliver Stone: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not actually — has not given any go aheads to anything, in 60 some years. I mean, they're really bad. If a government agency's going to be like, let's say the FDA, you could criticize the FDA because there aren't many issues, but they promote new drugs.

[00:23:48] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:48] Oliver Stone: Which has led to many improvements. We need more of an FDA kind of approach to let this thing happen. And they make it very tough for the smaller companies. That's why they get smaller because people don't want to invest big money if they're going to run into the regulatory commission.

[00:24:05] Jordan Harbinger: Nuclear plants. You brought this up sort of at the top of the show. Nuclear plants, they produce something like a hundred times the power of a solar plant per whatever acre, per square foot, however you want to measure it.

[00:24:16] Oliver Stone: Right, right.

[00:24:16] Jordan Harbinger: But there's nighttime, there's winter clouds. They make solar and practical nuclear reactors take up something like one-fifth of the space. Wind produces more than solar does, but it's only still about a quarter of the capacity of nuclear. And I did a little bit of math, and I think this is also in your film. You need 4,000 turbines spread across the land and plenty of wind, in that place, to equal one nuclear plant. And I don't really know anywhere where the wind blows across that big of a piece of land 24/7, without interruption. I don't think it exists.

[00:24:50] Oliver Stone: And don't forget the other problem. What's the backup for renewables? The perfect partner, it's been advertised, is gas. So they put gas in as an easy backup. That's methane, it gets out in the air. So it's not a solution. It's putting more sh*t into the universe. The nuclear could be a backup. Certainly, it could be and it can be worked out. There are all kinds of issues with the grid. Every grid is different. Obviously, India has a different grid than Denmark. You know, one's wind, one's solar. You know, there's a lot of variations on this and you cannot make a uniform rule, but we have to think about the world. I would say, generally speaking, if you could maximize solar and wind, if you could, and really get it going as much as possible and get a good backup for it. You could get, maybe 25 percent total of the energy we need in the coming future by 2050. 25 percent. And nuclear could cover easily 50 percent. Easily, along with hydropower, of course. A lot of countries still have hydropower. These are the most practical solutions, combinations of this. And of course, there's new energies are coming. We are doing new things. And I try to show that at the end of the film, with all the stuff, that nuclear is capable of breaking up hydrogen, using hydrogen to bring liquid fuels into the business. So nuclear could be combined with hydrogen to make liquid fuels for airplanes, as the scientist in Idaho National Lab was saying. It's very interesting developments if possible.

[00:26:20] We have to go all out on nuclear. We have to use it. It's a magic energy. As Einstein and Marie Curie and Jeremy said, it's a magic energy. We've got to be smart about it. It's got uses everywhere. It's the primary solution. Sun, wind, sea — we could take all the salt out of the sea water, you know, and we didn't use massive amounts of water available. And above all, earth. Earth being nuclear to me. Those four elements will solve climate change. It would not be an issue even if we had gone ahead with the Eisenhower program and the Kennedy program, but we didn't.

[00:26:56] Jordan Harbinger: As Asia modernizes, so India and China as well. They're going to need something like, well we, I should say as a planet, are going to need two to four times the current amount of power that we use now. And the question —

[00:27:08] Oliver Stone: Electricity. Yeah, yeah.

[00:27:09] Jordan Harbinger: The question is, will it be clean? Because if it's not, we're in deep trouble.

[00:27:13] Oliver Stone: Yeah. Two to five times the electricity. I wouldn't say the power because we have to electrify everything we can. That's why we're doing the cars now.

[00:27:20] Jordan Harbinger: I see.

[00:27:21] Oliver Stone: That's very important.

[00:27:22] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:22] Oliver Stone: But some of this stuff like liquid transportation fuels possible in the future will come through other means, will come through development of the hydrogen and nuclear, I believe.

[00:27:34] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. The film shows a lot of really interesting nuclear innovations. Smaller reactors that are modular and they could potentially scale down to fit in an office building and have a reactor underneath.

[00:27:44] Oliver Stone: Everywhere.

[00:27:45] Jordan Harbinger: It's really interesting. And so you can scale the stuff way down or way up as needed in, well, we will be able to in the future, which I think is fascinating. Because you can do something remote. Just like we do with submarines, right? There's a nuclear reactor in there. Powers the whole thing. The aircraft carrier. Same deal.

[00:27:58] Oliver Stone: But don't forget one caveat, and it's just nuclear reactors on submarines are enriched uranium.

[00:28:04] Jordan Harbinger: Oh they are?

[00:28:05] Oliver Stone: They're military enriched. Yeah.

[00:28:06] Jordan Harbinger: I didn't know that.

[00:28:06] Oliver Stone: They're not civilian usage. That was part of Rickover's deal. Rick over did cross over and give us the first — Admiral Rickover, gave us the first civilian nuclear reactor at ShippingPort, Pennsylvania, which was not enriched.

[00:28:20] Jordan Harbinger: So nuclear power developed in the first place. How this developed in the first place was submarine reactors. You mentioned Admiral Rickover.

[00:28:27] Oliver Stone: Rickover. Yeah.

[00:28:27] Jordan Harbinger: Hyman Rickover. He came up with a design, I think, or I shouldn't say that. He came up with a plan to implement the design.

[00:28:33] Oliver Stone: He was the engineer. Yeah.

[00:28:34] Jordan Harbinger: He was an engineer? Oh, so he may have actually come up with this. Started off with submarines using nuclear reactors, which I did not know were different levels of enriched uranium and then civilians. So nuclear actually started at what you would consider, "small scale" in air quotes because it was for use on one particular ship.

[00:28:51] Oliver Stone: Military usage, yes.

[00:28:53] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:28:53] Oliver Stone: It was the military usage. Right away, they used it for military purposes to build the bomb.

[00:28:57] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:57] Oliver Stone: I mean, Oppenheimer and all that, they got them those settlements project. But the Navy used it, the same kind of fuel to make, not bombs, but to make submarines run for 50 years. And then he crossed over that knowledge, I'm saying in the Shippingport, Pennsylvania by 1958. When he opened shipping port, he did a great job and he brought everything in on time, but a budget. He was a tough task master, one of the best we've ever had. We need good people. It has to be handled well, and he did a great job of safety. Anybody who worked with Rickover will tell you that he beat his officers up and made them really f*cking good people. And they were — we have a great nuclear force. We had one. And people who worked — I know people who worked with him and they were tip-top people. But now, you know, we lost that generation and we are getting it back. We have to train a new generation. That's what's going on now with all these startup companies.

[00:29:53] Jordan Harbinger: This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Oliver Stone. We'll be right back.

[00:29:58] This episode is once again, sponsored by BetterHelp. Our holiday season is fun with two little ones. We've got the daily Advent calendar chocolate reveal. That's all they really care about. The sibling gift swap where the kids learn that giving is just as fun as receiving. A lesson they are still learning. The cherry on top this year, my folks have moved in across the street. Turning every family gathering into a possible episode of a sitcom. More like — it's a little bit Everybody Loves Raymond, if I'm going to pick a sitcom. The holidays aren't just about dishing up presents. It's also prime time for self-care. Whether your family's more the Grinch or Santa Claus when it comes to gift giving, remember to treat yourself. Maybe, it's starting therapy. Shout out to BetterHelp for making mental health as accessible as online shopping. Or you take a day off to do, how about nothing? Because sometimes, doing nothing is kind of doing something, right? BetterHelp is like having a therapist on speed dial minus the dialing part. It's therapy in your slippers, in your PJs. Fill out a quick quiz, bam, your match with a therapist who actually gets you. And if they don't get you, no worries. Switch therapists anytime, no additional charge. A little slice of mental wellbeing might just be the best gift you give yourself this season.

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[00:31:22] Now for the rest of my conversation with Oliver Stone.

[00:31:27] It's really kind of exciting to see because I hate to say it, I almost counted nuclear out completely, especially in my lifetime. I just thought, "There's no way." I know China's building a ton of reactors. I was kind of hoping that might scare the rest of the world into catching up.

[00:31:41] Oliver Stone: Yeah.

[00:31:41] Jordan Harbinger: Provided we don't see a nuclear disaster in China to re-scare everyone again.

[00:31:46] Oliver Stone: Well, even if we did have a disaster, you know what's wrong with that? That's how progress is made, you know.

[00:31:51] Jordan Harbinger: Just from a psychological perspective though, of people going, "Ah, see. It's always—" I mean, that's what I mean by that.

[00:31:56] Oliver Stone: That's the problem. I mean, if you have one airplane crash, you're going to give up on the airplanes? You can't do that. You have to have a stick to an approach. Obviously, you want to avoid accidents, but accidents are part of the game too, you know? So when you say, one nuclear disaster in China, it's not likely to be a bomb-type thing because it's not enriched. It's more likely to be like a Fukushima, which was a hydrogen explosion, not a nuclear explosion. The only nuclear explosion was at Chornobyl and that was because they didn't have a containment structure. And they, as a result, the low level radiation spread all through Northern Europe. That's what led to the 4,000 assumed deaths from cancer. But we learned from Chornobyl, we shouldn't have shut down. That was the problem. The Soviets didn't. They moved on and they kept going in there. They've developed a breeder reactor, which I saw it in the Ural Mountains at Beloyarsk. It's amazing reactor. It eats its own waste. It uses its own waste to make more energy. So state of the art, it's too expensive for the market, but it's certainly a breakthrough reactor, and they've had that since the 1980s and 90s. They've done amazing work. Russia and China have to be commended for that and instead of attacked as enemies. I think, if the world is really the biggest problem in the world, I believe is climate change and it's not ideology or territorial fighting or Ukraine. It's that— it's really about climate change. They are our natural partners. Natural partners.

[00:33:19] Jordan Harbinger: Well, they have to be. Yeah.

[00:33:21] Oliver Stone: If we had stayed friendly with them instead of this Biden approach, I think we would've had the possibility of breakthroughs on a faster level. Now we're going to go slower because it's the nature of this world. It's very hard. But yeah, I consider it, just to sum it up, I consider it like a bit like a Cinderella story. Remember the story, the fairytale.

[00:33:40] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[00:33:41] Oliver Stone: Cinderella is the ugly sister. They put her in the back, mopping the floor in the kitchen. And the ugly sisters go out there and freeing and fro and they want to meet Prince Charming. And finally, at the end of the tale, Cinderella emerges as a beauty. She's been buried all along. This is what I considered to be nuclear energy, is the beauty of this. She's the Cinderella of this thing.

[00:34:01] Jordan Harbinger: Nuclear energy just needs a pair of glass slippers.

[00:34:04] Oliver Stone: That's right. I forgot the word. The glass slippers.

[00:34:07] Jordan Harbinger: It's been a minute since you've read Cinderella, I guess. Yeah, I mean, me too. I do have little kids, so I should— I probably got a copy in the living room.

[00:34:13] People are going to say, "Yeah, you mentioned Fukushima, but what about that?" I watched the film, of course, and I did some research on this. To clarify for most people who aren't that familiar, most damage in Fukushima was caused by a 100 foot tsunami from Japan's strongest ever earthquake, or at least in recorded history. And the plant had pretty terrible design. The sea wall was less than 20 feet high. Generators were all on low ground, which is a great idea in a tsunami area because they flooded with water and stopped working immediately. So the plant lost power, which helped the reactor melt down. Essentially, a meltdown means overheating, no cooling from water that was pumped in from the generators. Like you said, it wasn't the nuclear fuel that exploded, hydrogen gas built up, and I assume that stuff was pumped out and ventilated or something, normally with the generators. That wasn't happening. That then heated and exploded, which blasted nuclear fuel and other radioactive material into the air. But of note, other nuclear plants in the area were just fine because they were designed differently and the generators kept working. So the death toll from Fukushima was actually zero from nuclear and the tsunami itself, had 18,000 victims. And that still resulted in Japan shutting down almost all of their nuclear plants, which is not—

[00:35:30] Oliver Stone: Yeah, they panicked.

[00:35:31] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, they panicked.

[00:35:32] Oliver Stone: They checked out all the Japanese afterward for years, and nobody died from radiation poisoning. So here we go again, you know, the sensationalism. And then now is still, you know, with the tritium, the water that they're wanting to discharge in the Pacific, generally speaking, they're ready to do it. And there are scientific organizations have was okayed it. But there's still this sensationalism from the environmentalists who say, "Oh, tritium is going to screw up the ocean. This is nonsense."

[00:35:56] Jordan Harbinger: What is that? I don't know what that is.

[00:35:57] Oliver Stone: Tritium. It's a wastewater. It was part of the wastewater that was, Im not a scientist, but they want to put it in the ocean, which is where it belongs.

[00:36:06] And you could drink a gallon of tritium, several people have told me this. You could drink a gallon of tritium, it has the same effect as eating the banana, which is the same amount of radiation. But they've made it such an issue by sensationalizing it. They've balled it up. Now they, the Japanese are still not released this tritium into the ocean.

[00:36:23] Jordan Harbinger: I see. This is wastewater from Fukushima.

[00:36:25] Oliver Stone: Yeah.

[00:36:25] Jordan Harbinger: Tritium. I'm Googling this and it's very sort of low level stuff. I understand that the need for an abundance of caution, essentially, because you can't put that toothpaste back in the tube. But also, it's just from a science literacy perspective. You really do need to decide what you're going to panic about. Otherwise, we're not going to see nuclear supersede fossil fuels in our lifetime. I mean, maybe as fusion gets closer, people will realize we've got really no other choice.

[00:36:51] Oliver Stone: I would just love to see. I wish we could bring Einstein back or Enrico Fermi and see what they'd say. "What idiots." You know?

[00:36:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:36:58] Oliver Stone: They'd be saying, "What a historical tragedy this is, that you re let your ignorant people lead our society into this restriction where you cut off what Prometheus gave us." You know. This is a gift to mankind. A gift. Use nuclear well. It's part of the earth. It's part of what we have. It's frankly, the greatest. Uranium is a gift. And I wish we had intelligent people to lead our society, but we don't. We have people who, the scientists have not made a case for it that is— they surely for it. They're certainly pro-nuclear, but I've talked to a lot of them in MIT and at Harvard. Somehow they're not getting through because I think there's a general cynicism about science too. I think that people will say, "Oh, you know, I have my own conspiracy theory about this. I think scientist are this and that." It's true. I think there's a lot of too much of the superstition is in the air. Of course they'll blame me. But you know, on the Kennedy case, I just wanted to refer to that. You know damn well that Mr. Biden, on the night of Friday, the July 4th weekend, closed down and stuffed those files, stuffed that f*cking action. He illegally killed off the JFK Records Act. The power was given to Congress to open those files, and Biden took it back and basically said, "CIA and me, President, are going to decide what to release."

[00:38:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I don't know much about this. You mentioned it at the top of the show. I am curious what this is because I wasn't paying a ton of attention to this.

[00:38:27] Oliver Stone: Nobody was.

[00:38:27] Jordan Harbinger: All I know is they were set to release some of these documents about the Kennedy assassination and they didn't.

[00:38:32] Oliver Stone: I don't know exactly how many. I was told 4,000. Other people have told me more, far more. And a lot of it's about the CIA and a lot of these people. We know what they want. We want questions answered about which site these CIA agents we're working with the Cubans, this, that. There's names [inaudible] there's a bunch of them. People want to know more about 'em because they play into the connection with a Cuban operation to liberate Cuba. You know that all that was concealed from the Warren Commission by Dulles, who was on the Warren Commission. Dulles was the head, ex-head of the CIA. He'd been fired by Kennedy. And he said basically, he never told anybody on the Warren Commission that there'd been all these plots against Castro prior to Kennedy's death. So, I mean, you have to understand there's a lot of linkage there. There's a lot of reason, motifs, there's motives to kill Kennedy because there was a lot of dislike of what he was doing in Cuba. He wasn't prosecuting the war against Castro the way the radicals wanted him to. And well, opens up a whole lot of issues.

[00:39:33] But the point was that Biden said, "No more. Nothing's coming out." Why? This is 70 years later, right? 70 years.

[00:39:40] Jordan Harbinger: Geez, I don't even know.

[00:39:41] Oliver Stone: Roughly 60 years. I'm sorry. We're on the 60th anniversary. 60 years later. Oh, everybody's dead. You have to ask yourself, what is the danger? What are they scared of?

[00:39:50] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:39:50] Oliver Stone: Okay. Embarrassment? Okay. Then let him be embarrassed because the CIA did screw up numerous times on this case. We know that they had a relationship with Oswald for three, four years. This was a significant, and that he was on their radar. They knew all about him in Angleton. The counterintelligence chief knew about him and kept files secret from everybody else, too. And there was a lot of cloak and dagger stuff going on. And I think some of that could be embarrassing, but there's never going to be a document that says, you know, "This happened." And it doesn't work like that. But we know that embarrassments. What the hell, man? This is what it's about? This is what Congress intended. Transparency on these issues that are 60 years old. This is what's disgusting and nobody's been able to pick up on it because he did it very surreptitiously on that Friday night.

[00:40:37] Jordan Harbinger: I don't love stuff like that, of course. I think anything that sort of circumvents our system is usually a terrible idea.

[00:40:44] Oliver Stone: He broke the law.

[00:40:45] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:40:45] Oliver Stone: Because he said, "No more." This was an act of Congress, by the way. You cannot do that. You cannot undermine an act of Congress and say, "It doesn't apply anymore because CIA and I are going to decide what we want to release."

[00:40:57] Jordan Harbinger: By the way, I meant to ask you this because it's such a bizarre little thing in the film. In Nuclear Now, you mentioned you're in this French nuclear plant and they said, "Oh, the water's hot. Don't lean over the pool. Keep your cameras away from over the pool." But why? What happens? Are they worried about something falling into the pool?

[00:41:15] Oliver Stone: I believe I didn't really get into it deeply.

[00:41:17] Jordan Harbinger: No.

[00:41:17] Oliver Stone: They don't want foreign materials falling into that pool.

[00:41:19] Jordan Harbinger: Is it just cooling water? I don't get what that even is.

[00:41:22] Oliver Stone: It cools the water, yeah. But they don't want anything coming into it. That's why I asked if I could swim in it.

[00:41:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I saw that and then they left. But of course you don't want to swim in it, but what really is it? And is it like, "Oh, your camera strap falls in there. They got to send a guy in a suit down to go get it." Is that what happens?

[00:41:38] Oliver Stone: Yeah. Something like that, I imagine.

[00:41:40] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I was so curious about that.

[00:41:41] Oliver Stone: They want to keep it as pure as possible.

[00:41:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I suppose that makes sense. You don't want a corroded part in a nuclear reactor that you didn't find out about until later on. That seems like a bad idea.

[00:41:51] Oliver Stone: Although, we have a lot of corroded parts in the sun panels everywhere.

[00:41:55] Jordan Harbinger: Well, yeah. I just mean from a safety perspective, it's probably a really bad idea to have a camera, a lens cap floating around in a cooling pool.

[00:42:02] Oliver Stone, thank you so much for coming back on the show. I really appreciate it. Nuclear Now, we'll link it in the show notes.

[00:42:08] Oliver Stone: Well, thank you, Jordan. Always a pleasure to talk to you. You're very smart.

[00:42:11] Jordan Harbinger: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

[00:42:13] Oliver Stone: Thank you.

[00:42:16] You are about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show. About a guy who went from Nigerian royalty to the rugged streets of the Bronx. Remi Adeleke's life was thrown into chaos after a corrupt government stripped his family of their legacy. Dive deep into his captivating journey from being surrounded by drugs and drive-bys to his inspiring pursuit to become a US Navy Seal, even though he didn't know how to swim.

[00:42:36] Remi Adeleke: There's a saying in Nigeria, "Every day is for the thief." Corruption was my dad's demise. They knew that my father would not stop fighting them. They killed my dad. I went from riches and wealth to the Bronx, man. And it was really, really rough. Once you make the decision to join the Navy, in my opinion, you're giving up any fear of death. One day, I got approached by another human trafficking nonprofit that actually employed former seals and former agency guys to go into other countries to rescue kids trapped in sex trafficking, but specifically kids who are being purchased by Americans. When I got down there, my eyes would just like open fully, and I just remember being appalled that parents would sell their daughters to traffickers in the north. I just remember being disgusted. It's such a global issue. The human trafficking is a blanket term. Under human trafficking, you have sex trafficking, you have organ harvesting, you have forced marriage, you have forced labor. You know, I made the film in order to be able to expose more people to this atrocity of organ harvesting. But the perception of these traffickers is that they're these scraggly, evil looking, uneducated, you know, on the corner type people. And the reality is the majority of people involved on the organ harvesting side of thing are highly educated, learned people. The truth needs to get out there.

[00:44:05] Jordan Harbinger: But that's not all. Remi's fight is far from over as he confronts the dark underworld of human trafficking and illegal organ harvesting. To uncover what drives the man who refuses to be defeated, check out episode 868 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:44:19] If you want to watch the film yourself, it's called Nuclear Now. You can search for it and I'm sure there are easy ways to watch it. I want to say I saw it on YouTube and it was like a couple of bucks. Real easy watch.

[00:44:28] The one update is that since we recorded this, and of course, since the documentary was made, I think they ran into a pretty significant hiccup when it comes to the modular nuclear stuff, so the small scale stuff. Now, I haven't really done a lot of research on this, but it looks like, "Oh we're going to have a little nuclear reactor in every building." It looks like that's just kind of maybe not possible, or it needs a lot more work than they thought. So maybe it won't be modular, but I still think nuclear is the way to go, at least so far. All things Oliver Stone will be in the show notes jordanharbinger.com or just ask the AI chatbot on the website.

[00:45:02] Transcripts always in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. We've also got our newsletter. Every week, the team and I dig into an older episode of the show. We dissect lessons from it, takeaways. If you're a fan of the show, you want to recap of important highlights and takeaways, so you just want to know what to listen to next. The newsletter is a great place to do just that. jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget about Six-Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm @JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

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[00:46:09] This episode is sponsored in part by The Prosecutors podcast. Are you interested in a true crime podcast with a different point of view, with hosts who've seen the justice system from the inside? Then you should check out The Prosecutors. In every episode, full-Time Prosecutors, Alice and Brett, discuss the most famous and debated true crime mysteries like JonBenét Ramsey, Maura Murray, Scott Peterson, the Delphi murders. They'll bring details you won't hear anywhere else. The Prosecutors podcast is about more than just a story. Alice and Brett will walk you through the legal problems lurking behind every case, breaking down the complexities of the criminal justice system with humor and a personal touch. And it's not just true crime, they bring the same training and approach they've learned as prosecutors to classic mysteries like the Dyatlov Pass Incident and the Ghost Ship, Mary Celeste. So if you're looking for a true crime podcast with a different point of view, The Prosecutors is the one for you. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.