 My name is Eric Meyer, I'm the Founder and Executive Director of Generation Atomic, and thank you for joining us today in this discussion of nuclear advocacy at the Climate Talks, past, present, future. Today we will be thinking back to some memories from previous COPs, you know, some lows, some highs, some lessons learned. Also be examining different trends in communication, trends in technology and the interplay between them. We'll have a lively discussion and some fantastic panelists with us, which I will introduce now. So, starting on the end there, a good friend of mine, Mr. Ryan Pickering, who started in the solar industry and recently made his way to nuclear. Ryan, if you could fill in a few more gaps for our friends. My name is Ryan Pickering from California, United States, and it's a dream to be here. I thought I'd be here representing solar energy, and here I am, you know, 14 years into my exploration of energy representing nuclear, and I'm so grateful for this opportunity and for all the people in this movement who have taught me so much. Absolutely, we're grateful to have you here. Amazing. Here we have MIRTO Trapati from France, who I met first in 2015 at COP21 before Generation Atomic even existed, working on nuclear together. MIRTO, you've had a career in the nuclear industry before that moment, so help us out from then until now where you are the head of an NGO called Voices of Nuclear. I'll try to do it really quickly. Thank you very much, Eric. Thank you, all of you. It's a pleasure to be here. Indeed, I did work 10 years in the nuclear industry before I realized that my work as an engineer and as a professional was not, it didn't amount to much because as long as we hadn't solved the communication problem and the public acceptance problem, then none of all the beautiful tools for decarbonizing the world would ever be put to use. So I left just when the Paris Agreement, the COP21 arrived, was on the site. And this is when I think most of what we call now the pioneers met at that occasion, all trying their own little way, not having any organization, not having any network, no idea of what they would do and how and when and what. Decided to just start talking to one another and see how we could each contribute. So I did spend from that moment on, which was 2015, nearly three to four years into the COP's negotiation circuits with the UN Global Compact, trying to mobilize business and solutions to next to the diplomats and the NGOs that were already there. And after those four years, I was even more desperate because I realized that nuclear was not part of the conversation and the other technologies would contribute but certainly not solve on their own the issues we were facing, which is why in 2018 I decided to create the Voices of Nuclear, a lonely creation, as I'm sure Generation Atomic was when it was created at first as well. It's probably roughly the same time. 2016. 2016. Two years. Two years before. I guess. Wow. We'll see where I'll be two years from when I'll reach the same maturity. Then you guessed it. That's it. Very good. Thank you for sharing that. And I suppose it was around maybe 2019. I first started trading some emails with Miguel, but it wasn't until 2021 at COP26 in Glasgow where we first got to collaborate. Miguel comes from engineering discipline and has spent some time in the industry as well. It's actually the top drone pilot in the nuclear industry. But also realized there was a need for more outreach tools and educational tools around energy in general. And maybe you can explain what I'm hinting at here. Yeah, sure. So yeah, my name is Miguel Trenco Lopez and I started my career in nuclear decommissioning. As an engineer, very similar to Murto, I felt that I wasn't making the impact that I wanted to in that area and I felt my strengths were more around communicating, particularly on the science of nuclear and energy in general. So yeah, I came through Magnox, which we've taken apart the odd reactors in the UK. So these are the legacy first generation reactors and I supported them by helping to develop a drone program to make decommissioning safer, cheaper and faster. And while I was doing that, I was making a card game on the side. And about a year ago, I quit my job and tried to do the card game full time. And I was also involved at COP26 in general nuclear advocacy with nuclear for climate. And that's who I'm here with today as well. Thanks for being here, Miguel. All right. So in our discussion today, one of the things I want to explore is sort of the timeline, the trends, the crescendo of nuclear advocacy at this event here. And I know some of us have been there in the early days and have witnessed maybe, and not just this event actually, nuclear advocacy in general. So the question I wanted to ask here is maybe about a time where things seemed a bit desperate, seemed a bit lonely and just holding onto a shred of hope that perhaps our message could gain some traction here. Does maybe MIRTO might have an idea of something, I don't know, just because you're around in the early days. Any moments of hopelessness in those early days? I think I did go retrospectively, I didn't realise at the time, through serious echo anxiety in 2017 after three years of COPs where I was embedded. Nobody really knew I came from a nuclear background. I was UN Global Compact. I was perfectly respectable from the outside. I couldn't really express what I thought really. So it was a lonely time because my entire environment, professional environment, was absolutely not ready to hear anything I had to say. My personal and family environment, which was pretty leftist, was not ready to hear what I had to say either. My older sister, too, was really close. I have a family of scientists and engineers. I thought I was losing it when I started saying that Fukushima had not done any serious harm to people. So it was a little lonely while I increasingly saw how serious climate change was, even though I was one of the early adopters of the gravity of it all. When I realised through the three or four years of COPs where all the technological solutions that they were promoting, all of them were there, none of them would actually do it. People that were at the COPs were not really interested about whether it worked or not at what scale. And I find my way in a situation in 2017 where I wouldn't go back to the nuclear industry because it was collapsing and I had virtually collapsed. I mean, Arriva had collapsed, Westinghouse had collapsed, GE was not collapsing, but almost just because it was a tiny piece of a huge machine. Everyone was out of nuclear. Plants were shutting down in the US. Yes, everything was shutting down. I didn't want to go to all the new technologies because I didn't believe they were actually capable of bringing it at scale. And a lot of people were there and I didn't know so much about them either. And I didn't see myself changing entirely job and being, I don't know, a strategy or advisory to any some kind of handbags or yogurts or whatnot. And I did have six months of a very, very lonely time when I just did really ask myself what I was going to do with my life and with everyone else's life. Yeah. Well, you know, in every hero's journey, you have to have to have a low point at some place. Yeah, well, there was six long months. You're reminding me of a few experiences from the early days for myself as well. You know, I'm thinking of COP 22 in Marrakesh where the pro-nuclear contingent consisted of me, four other people from, couple from Europe, one from the US, and the Russian government. And that was one of the first. Yeah, it wasn't a huge, we had a few friends from IEA as well, I should include in that who are there. But yeah, it was quite small and the message was very hard to get out. And you're reminding me that, you know, the year after we had a bit more investment, a bit more organization. It was the first year we handed out the nuclear bananas with the stickers on them in bond. But it was also the same year that the World Nuclear Association attempted to sponsor a session at the Sustainable Innovation Forum, which is the highest, maybe the highest profile side event, was initially accepted and then word spread up the chain to the United Nations Environmental Program, who was in charge of the programming of this. They said, wait a second, nuclear is going to be in a plenary discussion? Send them their money back, they're not allowed. And we were, we did not get a seat at the table there. So we ended up setting our own literally outside and sitting there in the cold German wind and a little bit of rain trying to hand out croissants to passersby and get them to hear what we had to say for a few minutes. That was probably the lowest point for me emotionally during this entire journey. May complete, if you don't mind. I mean, what was really difficult when I was in the climate negotiations is that I had access to UN negotiators and the rooms and we could see what I was promoting an event that we created in Paris 2015, which was the Business and Climate Summit. So you were supposed to be in contact with what would be the business world or trying to bring solutions, the engineering, the governments that had nuclear in their mix, the French government, the first one of them and all of those people. And everyone was shutting down nuclear completely. It was an absolute taboo. The people who should have been the first one to at least recognize the facts, the technical facts at it, would not dare. And everyone was talking about being bold, being courageous, putting everything back on the table, you know, like attempting to save humanity by being innovative and creative and opening up your mind to everyone else, but, you know, not that far. So that was pretty upsetting. I mean, people like Sustainable, like I shouldn't give names, but I will, Sustainable Energy For All or even the business coalitions like Women's Business, WBCSD, all those guys, ICC. You know, I mean, you would expect them to be used to endorse the bad guy and, you know, to pass the hard messages. Even they would not. No one would. What do you do? Yeah, you keep fighting, right? You keep fighting on the street. Yeah, that's the only way to go. Ryan, I know you're a little bit newer to this movement, but I'm guessing you've also experienced a few lows and on the flip side perhaps some highs. You have some stories you'd like to share? Yeah, well, don't let the suit fool you. You know, I come from the radical left of California where we really believe that we could return to the land and use energy efficiency to allow us to live off of renewable energy. So, you know, for 10 years I was living off the grid in the mountains, you know, growing my own food, charging my solar panels, going to bed at 8 p.m. when my solar batteries ran out. And, you know, I really thought I was making a difference. And there were some very lonely times in that world, too. But, you know, I really felt like we were pushing something forward. And it was through that experience that I deepened my own understanding of energy and realized that, you know, what I was doing was not something that was available to working-class people, to people with families. I mean, it was just me. I was wearing an ice-climbing suit during the winter to stay warm because I wasn't allowed to have fires. It was meager. But now I'm having lonely moments as well in California because now everyone's kind of into that in California and maybe not quite, you know, using composting for everything. But, you know, certainly, like, believing that we can have 100% renewable energy vision. And two years ago, when I changed my mind about nuclear energy because of the closure, the pending closure of Diablo Canyon, you know, I took a new turn in my career and, you know, encouraged by so many of the people in this movement. I became very vocal. And it has been challenging to be ostracized. I just had a conversation five minutes ago, maybe 20 minutes ago now, with someone saying, like, I just can't understand why you've betrayed the environmental justice movement. I can't understand how you've done this with nuclear. And I just said, like, let's talk about it, you know? And I also have to go to a panel you should come, and they said, absolutely not. And so we're still growing through this, and I'm just, as I mentioned, gratitude. You know, on this trip, I've been able to meet some other pro-nuclear people that I've, you know, seen online from around the world, and I'm feeling the solidarity, and it's recharging me to power forward and go back to California and keep trying to legalize nuclear energy in California and support all these other legalization movements around the world. Fantastic. And, Miguel, so I've been, this is my sixth cop, and so I've seen the trend over time, and I do have to say that cop26 in Glasgow was a bit of a coming-out party thanks to the excellent organizing work of the Nuclear for Climate team there, and Miguel was, you know, right at the center of it, so maybe you have a few highs to share with us from that experience. Yeah, I kind of like to start at the beginning of my advocacy journey, so always been interested in energy. It's always been something I've been passionate about, and our, you know, government's not doing enough to change. And then the Extinction Rebellion movement came about, and I don't know how strong it was in other countries, but in the UK it was a very big movement, and I decided that I wanted to be a part of it, so I took some time off work, I dressed nice, because I know in the UK media, they're all crusty hippies, you know, they won net zero by 2025, all their demands were extreme, it's not feasible, they're crazy, and so I wanted to give it a sense of credibility so I dressed nice, unlike here I dressed in a T-shirt to be approachable, there was the opposite, and I also took with me some leaflets that I made about nuclear power, because I also knew that nobody there would have any interest in nuclear as part of the solution, so I took a few days off and went to it, and it was actually so magical, the sense of community there, this was before the police in the UK started cracking down on these things, because of a giant pink boat for a week, and it was amazing, it was a really amazing thing to be part of. Sorry, did you say a giant pink bird? Boat, because we are sinking, the concept was that, sea levels are rising, we're sinking, and it was a giant pink boat, and I was there when it arrived, and I was there when the police eventually took it away, and I always had to be on the edge of being arrested, in the nuclear decommissioning world, and with my security clearance, being arrested was a big issue, and they actually raised activism as a security threat, so the fact that me being there was a problem. And what you're not saying is that you did shut down London doing this. Sorry? You did shut down London. London was shut down. I don't think in the UK history, it has been that big of an impact. It was incredible, and it was amazing coming back to work in nuclear decommissioning. People didn't understand why I was doing it. I was the undercover hippie, that's what some people call me. They thought I was just silly, and all that activists and young, and all the interesting stuff, so it wasn't really something that was encouraged in the industry, and that's where my activism started. Six months later it happened again, and at the time I was working in the Department of Energy, and that was my building that I was working in. And so that was a bit of a dilemma about how involved I should be in this movement that I'll literally have a pass to get into the building, that everyone's protesting outside. I helped a little, someone needed some printing support, so I went in and printed off our printer some schedules for the people working there. There's a little bit of undercover involvement, but anyway, this kind of got me into the advocacy movement, COP26 to talk about nuclear, and I'd say some of the lows was definitely at COP26, because although you said it was a big change, a big step up, it was my first experience in that kind of world, and you come there with a lot of passion, a lot of deep belief that you're doing the right thing, and some of the approaches that people would come to me, it's disgusting what you're doing, questioning my incentives, questioning why I was there, who was funding me, it was really a personal attack, and it kind of really builds up on you. I've been called a fascist for supporting nuclear. I'm like, I don't think you know what fascism means. So it's definitely challenging, and I really respect you guys that went to those, I can't imagine what it was like at the first COP, because you were saying COP26 was good, I mean, it was hard, and in Bond, I mean, I could imagine it was really difficult. Yeah, I guess, so COP26, when I think back to it, two things come to mind. One is the emergence of Bella, the giant inflatable bear, and then the flash mob, Dance Party that we had, which is expertly choreographed, which Myrto elbowed me in the face at the very beginning of, actually my fault. I know you're taking, there was a rapid costume change, elbows were flying everywhere, was able to shake off the concussion. No, but that I thought was quite special, and got quite a bit of media attention as well. Can I jump in? Yeah, go ahead. What we have to realize is that I think the reason, because I think you want to talk a little bit about innovation afterwards, I think that kind of leads to it, is that one of the reasons why we did what we did when we did it, is that we wanted it to be done, and no one else would. And me, I literally searched almost for years and tried to convince people, I put myself at the service of people, organizations, institutions, and explaining them why all my first presentations and power points were trying to convince other people to do it. And at the end, it was because no one word that I started doing it. So that's the low part, but the up part is when you realize that other people have had the same reaction at some point. And definitely the group of people that we are today, we were before, and everyone that's joining it, is definitely the strength of the movement. It's that drive of people deciding that something everyone tells you does not exist, should not exist, has no reasons to exist, will never do. You decide to attempt it anyway. The nuclear industry is very risk averse. And even something as simple as talking about what's good about nuclear energy has historically felt risky for people. They feel like they're going to do it wrong. And I've heard from a senior executive, this was in 2016, 2017 that the communication strategy has been to keep our heads down and hope that everybody forgets about us. So they won't do anything. We can just hide in the corner and that'll work. And as a result, the counter narrative of that, which is that this is an expensive dirty form of energy, that maintenance isn't being done well, the workers are incompetent like Homer Simpson, that kind of thing has been able to spread because there's no, there hasn't been a pro side in many situations. So I think you're right, we realize the need for innovation in communicating on that. Whereas I think that industry thought, well, maybe we can engineer a reactor that's slightly safer. We'll put an extra containment dome on. We'll put a couple of redundant extra safety systems and that'll make people feel safer and then they'll like nuclear more as a result of that. I don't think that's how the human brain works or any animal for that matter. And I think we've shown, our theory has been proven out over the years that communication innovation and communication, how we tell stories, how we talk about this, how we human scale it is more effective than building a better mousetrap. Ryan, what do you think about this? Do people like solar because the crystals have improved in efficiency by 10% or something like that? People like solar because they've created an imagined future that is palatable for people, even desirable. And especially in California things like the aesthetics of the solar punk movement this idea that less is more, small is beautiful that we can outsource our industries and then they cease to exist and we can just buy products. There's some California industry left but I'm really lucky because I got involved in the Save Diablo movement. That was my first foray into nuclear and when we're talking about communications I think that the Save Diablo movement was a real master class because it was the convergence of many groups and led by Mothers for Nuclear who had this very human centered focus and talking about imagined futures and talking about future generations and taking this parenting role at it and also this kind of gender equity, feminist perspective and also tapping into the local community connecting with the local tribe in the area and they had their perspectives about nuclear energy and then Isabel Bemekie's group of Save Clean Energy kind of bringing this like these kind of curve balls and like more pizzazz and gravitas and then generation atomic and stand up for nuclear all coming into the space to say something to talk about it differently and to show up in person too because it seems like renewables has benefitted from a lot of social movements and that are akin to environmentalism and nuclear doesn't show up in person very often and this was a physical event that over 100 people attended outside of the courthouse and when you get into the view of the public and you get the media taking pictures of you in public I think that was enough to that really changed the trajectory of Diablo Canyon and I think it made an impact in the global nuclear energy movement Homemade signs the blimp visual representations go a long way that's one of the lessons I've learned from that I see we have a question from the audience I'll just keep it short I was just curious about those indigenous community community perspectives if you could elaborate on that well I think I want to commend the nuclear movement for taking the time to research who are the indigenous people in these communities that nuclear power plants are located in I don't think that's something that's happened in the past I don't think that's something that we often look into as humans working on anything and we were lucky to connect with Yachtichu-Tichu, Yachtilhene tribe of the San Luis Obispo region and they came out we extended an invitation to them and we came to them saying there's a lot of history here that we don't know and we're open to learning more and they sent some representatives to the rally not to participate but to kind of observe and that has been an open dialogue since then the leaders of our movement have met with them multiple times and this has really helped us understand kind of the timelines we're really talking about we're so focused on like building nuclear, saving nuclear, powering the grid today but I've been so inspired by the tribe and there's a book being written about Diablo Canyon and the tribe is playing a very prominent role in that book and they're taking on that land for 10,000 years it was stolen from them a nuclear power plant was placed there and they've had to deal with the ramifications of all this and what's interesting is that the tribe helped build the plant 50 years ago and there's an indigenous nuclear operator who works at the plant and the tribe is split some support nuclear, some don't just like our own communities and these debates are not these debates are for everyone and I encourage it takes a lot of patients and maybe a little bit of bravery to reach out to indigenous people but I think we have a responsibility especially in places like the United States who have a complex colonial history one thing that's running through my mind and thank you for saying that and bringing that question because that's something I'm going to put a bow on that that is something I think traditionally the industry has been afraid to engage with and in the past few years we've seen instead more support for putting forth solutions to historical injustices as a part of solutions to the climate crisis here US legislation called the advance act for example that it has money for developing a fuel supply chain for LEU and high assay and low enrichment for advanced reactors some regulatory reforms and also funding to clean up some of these superfund sites that in the wild west days of let's get as much uranium as possible no matter how hard it environment be damned, people be damned we're cleaning up those early days when we're prospecting for uranium for nuclear weapons and we're less concerned about the people of the land there and that is a really good trend to see I know there's been similar efforts in other countries as well and the uranium mining disaster that happened in the Colorado Plateau in the 1970 years ago is still a sensitive subject for indigenous people in the United States and it is still not resolved and more work has to be done more listening, more reconciliation and that's just the reality of the situation for American nuclear but I've been very grateful to have conversations with D.N.A. people and I look forward to this book coming out about Diablo because the tribe is sharing these ideas about what it could mean for self-governance if indigenous people were to be able to build nuclear energy on their own sovereign land and go around some of these anti-nuclear laws and what that could mean for indigenous self-governance and so I think that's a powerful vision and I hope more indigenous people will be able to hear about that and engage with that. This wasn't in my original outline but I'm glad we're exploring it. I'll say one more thing before we pivot to the next part of this conversation which is that land use injustices are definitely not unique to nuclear energy I'm thinking of the First Nations people in Quebec who were displaced from their lands and they were taken away from their home and they were taken away from their home and they were taken away from their home and these are traditional fishing lands going back thousands of years just being taken away for a song very small amounts of money and people displaced an entire way of life lost and there's a tribal community and we saw many people in northern Finland Greta Thunberg joined them for this protest against a new wind installation there so land use issues are definitely not unique to nuclear but I hope that the nuclear industry can respect them as we go forward towards that brighter future with that clean energy transition so thanks for bringing that up guys great sort of our agenda of discussion I would like to discuss oh I wanted to get so we got a couple engineers here but I wanted to get you to read what's more helpful that there are reactor designs that are passively inherently safe because of the physics that we can talk about in our advocacy there or recycling of nuclear waste for example or communication innovations of bringing a fuel pallet around and saying this is the same as a ton of coal or a polar bear named Melty so when people think the word melt they think about climate change not about meltdowns having that semantic shift communications innovation there talk to me a little bit about in advocacy how those interplay in effectiveness so when I was at the extension rebellion protest one of the leaf information a lot of it was about gen 4 reactors and about the exciting innovations that are happening for example inherent passive safety recycling of waste all these things that we see as like key to making the industry go forward and some people would see that and be like really interested fantastic and some people had absolutely no interest in these technological changes and so I think we need both we need to do that and we need to communicate it properly and we need the people that are both for those things to do those things we want great engineers working on engineering problems and great communicators working on communication and I found myself more on the communication side so that's where I've kind of pivoted and focused on you have something to add yeah I guess I never felt myself as a communicator and I think it was a pretty bad one and I really but I really thought that something needed to be done as I said earlier and what I do is I acted I tried to see what in what I was could make sense and I'm saying this because what we see today in the in the climate whatever time is left for us and everything is that people should be fighting on the results that they get from all the path and all the attempts and all the solutions that we see around in the COP but they're still fighting on the intentions so we're not there yet because no one's aligned but we can see in the COP and I'm sorry to pass that pretty strong and stark message is that we're not aligned we should be fighting on who does better but no one is doing so much progress at all so we still need everyone all of you to not look at what we did in the past but see what you guys can do now and the way I managed it back in the days when I thought that I didn't have much to bring to the conversation where was I good? I was good in nuclear and I knew and I was legitimate to talk about it so maybe that was where I should focus and that's what answer people would tell me why didn't you promote solar or wind there was plenty of other people doing it and I didn't know anything about it so how stupid would I have looked if I'd started talking about it so I chose something I knew then I realized which something had known that I was a woman I was relatively young I was not white and that probably would change the outlook of the average pro nuclear French person who was above 60 white with a suit and blah blah blah you know the story so I was like well just maybe advertising myself if I say nothing could work right and the third thing is that I applied my reasoning as an engineer so I was not so innovative at all I just said well people apply people in their decision making I think apply probability and when you tell them that something which is nuclear power does no good even if it has a tiny risk it's still too much right for something that brings no benefits if you start increasing the benefits part even if that risk thing still is there it puts it back in perspective second reasoning it's what I call the bench paradigm which is if you look at nuclear as if it was under a microscope with nothing on it on a bench that's clear that it's wide in absolute terms then yes you want it to be perfect but if you put it back in perspective with the alternatives with the benefits it brings to the people to the society then it changes completely the outlook you have of it and finally the third a very important point which all of those understanding impacted the way they decide to communicate with it was when you realize that the opponents to nuclear power never always talk about potential future risks things people like us engineers we don't know how to answer to because because yes it's always there's always a tiny possibility things could happen and their strategy is to always build up a risk that you cannot demonstrate against and since we're with engineering scientific backgrounds we don't want to lie by saying you know there's zero risk it's 100% good and their strategy was that to protect you in the future and to force that communication to be like this so apply your skills to the new field because it has to be occupied and see what you can do with it the fear, uncertainty and doubt and another aspect of that so you kind of laid out sort of consequences rationality type of way of assessing do I like nuclear or not and I think another lens that people often view this through without even realizing it is through kind of your tribal affiliation as you know as part of your identity well I'm on the left and a lot of folks in my state of Minnesota still who consider themselves on the left and consider themselves environmental think environmentally minded think that by default means you're against nuclear and there's no point in examining the belief anymore because that's one of the things on the menu that you sign up for as being on the left environmentalist and I think because of the innovations in communication, messaging and us connecting this issue to land use materials use and the greater climate movement we have been able to show that hey you can be part of this tribe as well this is not incompatible with that identity so another way to make some progress there I didn't even know we were set up for questions from the audience and now I'm thinking that could be fun I've seen a lot of just talking head panels and I bet our audience has some amazing questions so I'm going to go ahead and cross the rest of mine off and point to Johan Thank you so much for the talk I was just wondering because when we talk about waste management and now you have not in waste management but decommissioner Miguel what is your thought about the argument that we sometimes talk about waste as something that can be reused and something that can be re-processed and be used in new reactor technologies because when I talk to policymakers or other technical people they seem to be it doesn't resonate with them so why don't we only just focus on we have a solution as deep geolotical repositories as in Finland and now doing in Sweden and stop talking about this potential for a future where we maybe can re-process the waste it sounds good of course but it's not like feasible right now so why don't we only just stick to the argument about having these deep geolotical repositories as of the JARC the European Joint Research Centre they conclude that this is the scientific consensus of handling high level waste so what are your thoughts on that argument of using the future argument of potential waste burners and fourth gen reactors that can use waste if I may quickly I'll try the advantage of having done this for some time is that you've gone through a lot of fails and one of them is trying to have one message that works for everyone so I think a lot of those messages work on different people and I think we probably need them all and the real skill at the end you realise is to try to understand who you have in front of you and what will work with this person will be totally different from another one that being said I agree with you that contrary to what we will all have intuitively as an answer that yes the fact that it can be reused it's a circular economy it's entirely recyclable kind of renewable all of those things we tend to say it does not work so much it says very abstract it doesn't come down to people's lives and so this may be an answer a lot of people would actually find arguments against that answer you propose which I think works for some people so the only thing I'm going to do is report the third one I just discovered recently so that you have three which actually works pretty well that's why I'm sharing it is to say that nuclear waste is not a pollution and to remind everyone it's two different concepts because since nuclear waste is generated in small quantities quantities within the industrial process and remains in that industrial process all its life long it never touches people, never touches the environment and people care about that and they realize that oh okay it's not a pollution and everything does waste and it does less waste with less impact and all the other alternatives and now it becomes and now you can pull out your it also can be recycled because research is working and science is progressing and don't worry not only does it have no impact on you and on your children but at the same time it's not going to have an impact on future generations and that is the order with which people live they live their day today then they live their day tomorrow the week after and only after they think about 20 years from now anything else to say, otherwise we can go to another question I guess I'll just give the UK perspective so it was back in the 80s that scientists agreed that deep geological repository was the best way to go and the UK started a consultation process for where to place that that failed, they started another one that failed, they started another one and I think it's been 40 years of consultations trying to figure out what to do with this and everyone kind of agreed that's another issue, we can't explore our waste but everyone kind of knows where it's going to go there's a cellar field where most of the waste is and there's very good geology there where we can store it and it just makes sense but the consultation process has been rubbish and politicians, democracy is on a four year cycle right so these kind of issues are so long term that it's very easy for a politician to deal with this, this doesn't have to be my problem I'm going to avoid it and we have the largest plutonium store in the world, we have 150 tons of plutonium and there's been constant discussions about what to do with it and that's a huge resource that's very valuable to create new fuels but sometimes a lot of politicians say you know what we're just going to bury it and make it non-retrievable and just get rid of the problem and it's just a constant yo-yo between what we should be doing with it and from an American perspective we've just embarked on a new program called Consent-Based Siting I'm involved in it through my work with Mothers for Nuclear who was selected for a grant and it's a 12 year process to find is there any communities out there who want this who would want to host this because if someone says hey these people want it how can you argue with that and this buys us some time hundreds of years perhaps to you know find kinds of amazing recycling technologies because we know it's valuable and you know we have also failed at a deep geological repository a painful subject in American nuclear history and I'm optimistic that Consent-Based Siting can work I'm optimistic that many communities will come forward and will be able to distribute this and we'll keep it in canisters and those canisters are good for 100 years and then we can swap them to new canisters in 100 years if we're not ready to recycle them I hope that we'll find an economic solution for this challenge I think that's the key thing about economics because at the moment it's just cheaper to mine your uranium and build new fuel rather than reprocess until there's actually like a requirement to do it I think it's difficult this isn't a strategy that will work for everyone but I've been privileged enough to hug and even give a little tiny kiss to a spent fuel cask recently and I had my Geiger counter along with me and found the most radioactive spot on this spent fuel cask which was full of very recently out of the reactor fuel it wasn't like that super old from decades ago it was pretty new fuel and the most radioactive spot was in this air vent I could reach and the number of microcevates per hour was about 15 so I like to tell people that and then say put this Geiger counter on this little orange plate I have and they see it spike up to 20 and I point out that nuclear waste in a spent fuel cask is less radioactive than this plate now so yeah if you can get to a storage facility and get permission to hug a cast I recommend it do we have another question yes so I think in the nuclear industry we're very good at communicating the benefits of nuclear sorry we're very good at communicating the benefits of nuclear but sometimes tend to gloss over the risks of nuclear and I've heard this in a panel discussion at my university where it can come across as we're trying to hide what can go wrong with nuclear where there are risks but how do we put it in context of the risks of climate change and people who are against nuclear but also are against fossil fuels and only want renewables how do we communicate the risks of not using nuclear in terms of the climate crisis I think we'll start with Ryan with this one sure if you like or we can come back you know my feeling about it is that these risk-based assessments are becoming quite popular in the United States in which we're saying let's look at these risks very honestly and let's look at the risk of not using nuclear and I can understand how that's a cop out and my advice is beyond any information it's about the way that we address people and it must be conversational it must be listened first and address it because people will have very specific conceptions about this and if we don't ask them what those are then we just start yelling facts at them and I think that's where we sound most that's where we lack credibility so I just try to be rooted and say what's your perspective on nuclear energy and what's your perspective on this challenge that you've brought up and hopefully they can hint at some of the language that they want to talk about and I think you know being brave and addressing the past and it is a powerful strategy but also staying rooted obviously in the risk of not using nuclear energy which we're all becoming more and more aware of I'd like to add something that's actually maybe quite a different perspective from my work in the drone industry so there's a lot of push in the industry to go beyond visual line of sight and autonomous operation so you've got drones flying around, no pilot doing deliveries, doing emergency service work, all that kind of stuff and it's very difficult for the regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority, the UK to assess those risks to other aircraft, to other people and the industry's trying to come up with ways to assess it but what it doesn't do is put that risk against the risk of not doing it so for example drone delivery that brings like urgent blood, urgent organs from hospital to hospital in a city can reduce it from an hour to two minutes and the only risk that they're looking at is oh what if it's 0.01% chance of it crashing and then hitting the 0.01% area of where there's a person there and these risks are just weighted against nothing it's like oh this is an extra risk rather than looking at the whole benefits realised and I think the last event I went to was talking all about this and how the industry can come up with a standardised way of measuring it across different bringing all the benefits together and saying there is a risk that this drone might one day hit someone and kill someone but in that operation it's going to save a thousand lives so we should be doing that so I wonder if there's something to learn from that and for the industry to come together and be able to do something like that and I want to thank you because I think that the best news I've had for the entire cop if that really happens and if you really feel it like this it's really new it must be a year old that the industry actually talks about the benefits of nuclear honestly the only thing they were doing was talking about the risks and how to how it was not so bad but certainly never talk about the benefits so if that's what's happening now I guess it's just the counter movement and it's going to come back to the centre at some point so it's not so bad it's rather good news and if we talk about communication strategy a little bit if we are under that angle the one strategy I found which actually should be done from French TV not so long ago have been shut down from French TV the anti-nuclear movement for the past year because I said one thing prime time I was and the strategy was to use the words and the concepts that the other ones understand and manipulate all day and I'll give you two examples so that example on French TV was I was with two very prominent anti-nuclear people and I said well you think you know I think that by downsizing by oversizing anti-nuclear risk as compared to climate risk you are being climate relativist it's a form of climate scepticism and that was just like the blue everyone was like oh wow there you know cold climate sceptics but that's in effect what they were doing I mean if you rate the different risk is exactly what you mentioned that's exactly what you're doing so using their words that they understand and they know very well what you're putting in what you've bring to their life, that's what we put behind another example is when we started calling ourselves the whistle-blower and we said we used to be part of the industry and as citizens we've been made aware of a situation that other citizens don't know about and we came out of our role to inform because I thought it was important that people knew And using their words and their concepts, re-applying them to what you're trying to explain, make it clearer. Yeah, I can just share that. My first nuclear power plant tour was in 2014 at the Ablo Canyon. And I remember thinking, this isn't really a tour of the nuclear power plant. This is a tour of the nuclear power plant's safety systems. That was the main thing they were talking about the entire time. I don't know if I heard anything about how much carbon-free electricity that was the largest source of low carbon power in California, how many fossil fuels it would take to replace it, anything like that. It was just like, trust us, we won't kill you. Imagine if you, on a first date with someone, the person you're sitting across the table that said, good news, 100% of the people I've gone out on dates with have not died during the date. Like, does that make you feel safer? I don't think so. Great question, though. We will, I'll look at my watch here. I think we have time for one more question and then we'll go to kind of closing statements. Very good. Anybody got another one? Oh yeah, so I think maybe this is the right place I can ask my question, is this time at Cobb, there were many people talking about fusion and I just wanted to know atoms for climate and nuclear for climate. Do you also want that the fusion people when they come to conference, they stay away from them, from the normal, normal fission nuclear people during conference because they are like so scared to death that the heritage of public acceptance and perception is so bad with fission. They just don't want to inherit this. So I would like to know what you guys think. I can start, so I was actually invited by ITER to talk with a chat we had yesterday about fission and fusion and how we can collaborate at events like this. Let's see an international project to build a fusion reactor in the France. Yeah, it's based in France, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I'd say they were quite keen to talk and I think they've seen what a great job we're doing and they see themselves as part of this movement. I think there's a risk that one of the, from our side, from the fission side, is that one of the biggest challenges that we have is cost and time to communicate to people that this is a solution that is gonna help solve climate change now and fusion is a little bit more challenging to sell that. And so I think they're trying to maybe learn from us about how they can communicate that a little bit because there's a lot of skills transferred between the industries. There's a lot of jets in the UK is about to go into decommissioning. A lot of people from the decommissioning reactors are moving towards jets to support them in that because it's a very different kind of operation from doing science tests to decommissioning, I'm sorry. That's something people don't really realize that fusion has quite a lot of intermediate-level waste and it has its own challenges. But I don't know if that answers your question, but they were pretty happy to talk to us. And yeah, I'm a bit skeptical about how we communicate about fusion being the solution now, but we've got to remember that 2050's not, we get to 2050 and that's it, it's over. We're talking about 2100, we're talking about 2200. And the sort of spin-offs that you get from investigating these material sciences and really extreme complex engineering problems, there's loads of support in, so the supercapacitors that they're developing to support fantastic grids, transportation, there's lots of benefits of doing this kind of research. Yeah, anything on fusion? More generally, I think we should be cautious all the nuclear, the nuclear's family. I like to say that nuclear is a physics concept like combustion or that has many, many applications. So it's not one technology, it's many of them. And I think we should be very cautious at not putting in competition those different nuclear technologies, which is something that is getting started now that we are almost in a nuclear bubble because they're starting to compete for funds and everything when before we're kind of all in the same boat. So we need to be careful of that because it has been a strategy of the anti-nuclear movement to push for fusion, for example. So just that we forget about fission. It's actually what happened at the European Commission that under the obligations they have under Euratom, which is one of the founding treaty of the European Union, they put all the money to four things, waste, radio protection, safety, as you can imagine, and fusion, which means that current fission and a power production is completely obliterated. And what they do is that they know very well that fusion is gonna take a certain time and think that if you kill the bridges to fusion, it will just not happen because you will not have a workforce, you will not have a public acceptance, no supply chain, no research, no regulatory people that are trained to do it, and so on. So if you advocate for something like fusion only, then you take the risk of killing fusion when it's time for it to come. So there really should be a collaboration between all of those saying it's a relay race and at some point everybody's gonna play that part and we should, I think, present a joint front. That also means that generation four, I will include generation four in the conversation, and fusion are also clear about not going into that competitive discourse between the different generations. I think all of them are important. And based on the conversation I had yesterday, that's the feeling I got from them. And something I learned as well that I didn't realize was that previously fusion was known as gen five, and then they realized that they didn't want to, it's kind of the sequential nature of gen four and gen five. They're not gonna wait for our gen four to come through, so then they've changed their language. But I think they're largely very supportive of what you said. No, I think drawing separation is coming, it's something that comes from the other side. It's the anti-nuclear movement is trying to put everyone against one another and we should be cautious not to fall into that. I've been really impressed by American fusion. Most of the people working in there are very supportive of American vision and understand that if American vision doesn't work out, as you said, Mirto, the conditions for fusion to exist will not be there when fusion is ready to compete for our business. Some of our strongest volunteers come from a fusion background, a plasma physics background, and they love vision too and I think someday we'll have some fusion as well. I think it's really the core principles of energy density, small amounts of land use nearly limitless fuel supply. Those are the boxes that we as a pro-nuclear movement like and yeah, it's a good reminder though that fusion is a part of that. Yeah, great, I think we are about out of time. I'll go just for the brief closing thoughts and remarks on our discussion. We'll start with Miguel and go down the line here. Yeah, I think it's been a fantastic conversation actually. I've actually learned from everyone here today. It's really important to have these conversations to share our experiences and journeys with other people because it kind of understanding where we've come from and why we've done what we're doing is really important. I think often that's not included in the conversation around nuclear, we're just spouting facts and we're not really talking about why we're here. So I think that's been really good to hear from you guys coming through like that and yourself. Thank you. So thank you guys. Thank you. Your turn. I guess I may conclude on the concept of innovation. They asked us from before in communication and elsewhere. I mean, definitely innovation in our field now. It spurs from very simple things like the realization that something should be and is not. Then once you realize something should be, seek answers elsewhere, which means even in other fields or opponents that do some things great. I mean, we've copied Greenpeace so many times. So if they do it well, there must be things to steal from that. That's also innovation, how it works in engineering. It works the same in communication. So realizing there's a cap, going to see elsewhere how other people feel that gap and then lowering your own boundaries on should I do it? Is it possible? Is it to be the right person? Is everyone agreeing with it or not? If you get rid of, if you check all those three boxes, then I think you find new ideas or they come to you and maybe to conclude on that topic. Once I said that, these days I'm pretty wary on innovation and tend to want to put progress back in the beginning of the conversation because we tend to forget progress. Innovation is a very individual thing short-term, make a lot of impact. You don't know if it's gonna be good or not, innovation doesn't have to be for the common good. And I think we tend to forget the concept of progress which is more collective, maybe slower, maybe draws on things that previously existed like nuclear previously existed, the climate crisis. Still is something that is very important for common progress. So I think we should rehabilitate the concept of progress next to the one of innovation. Thank you, Miratel and Ryan. Well, I think I'll conclude where I started which is a place of gratitude. We are, this movement is built on 70 years of human innovation and progress and so much hard work and we can brag about this and we can kind of puff our chests out right now because of the decades and generations of hard work that have gone into this industry and the people who are working in this industry right now who have made this technology no longer experimental. This is a proven climate-saving technology and we can now point to that. And I think that's kind of why it's changing is it doesn't feel experimental anymore. It feels kind of like the known proven path and I'll conclude with two challenges. The first is that this movement needs to continue to grow. We have to find patience and welcome more people into this movement. We cannot get comfortable. This is an irresistible human idea and it's going to take many more thousands of nuclear advocates to pressuring and educating their community, pressuring lawmakers and educating their communities. And I'll finish maybe with a very American style conclusion in that we need more competition in this industry. I think that these nuclear companies are calcified and I'm so inspired by some of the people I've met here who are taking advocacy and then taking it into entrepreneurship, finding these gaps in the industry where these big calcified players aren't covering and entrepreneurship drives innovation and it'll shake these nuclear companies and it will also enable them to move forward. We're talking about nuclear finance, creative ways of sales and marketing and other gaps in supply chain that are gonna be needed to accelerate this. So if you're an entrepreneur, reach out to me. We're trying to mentor as many entrepreneurs as well as advocates. And if that sounds appealing to you, move to the Bay Area of California where we're gonna try to push it forward. God bless America. With that, I wanna thank our sponsors here, the IEA, not only for the opportunity to bring this program to you today, but also for their tireless work, spreading, helping countries get into nuclear, helping keep our nuclear material safe and accounted for around the world, helping keep our food safe and the many other things that IEA works on day in, day out, bringing together the global nuclear community. It's been incredible working with folks at the IEA over the years and I'm so appreciative of their continued existence and growth and vision for all of us. I'm very, very grateful for that. And with that, stay radiant and keep fighting for the future. We all know it's possible. Thank you and enjoy the rest of the cup.