Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our briefing titled Toward an Evidence-Based Nuclear Energy Policy. I'm Dan Berset, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. ESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change to policymakers. We do our best to focus on solutions, something I hope comes across over the next 90 minutes and emphasize what can be done in response to a warming planet across the full range of mitigation and adaptation strategies. We've also developed a program over time to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. Whether our audience is policymakers, the public, or both, our goal is to provide informative, objective, nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics in written materials and on social media. And the best way to keep track of it all is to visit us online at www.esi.org and sign up for climate change solutions, our bi-weekly newsletter, and then follow us on Twitter at EESI online. Today, we will pick up an issue, nuclear power, that we last covered a few months back in November. At that time, during the early weeks of the lame duck days of the 116th Congress, these pressing issues were in the news because there were proposals pending that would change how we decommission nuclear power plants and responsibly or try to responsibly manage nuclear waste for the long term. We've had several briefings on this topic in the last few years, and today we will pick up where we left off for the benefit of the new Congress. Nuclear power inspires passionate reactions from people, whether they see it as more good than bad or as a source of more risks than benefits. Speaking for myself, I need to know as much as I can about this topic. I have so much to learn. I realize that nuclear power will continue to be a part of the U.S. energy mix for some time. So the more I understand about it, the better. According to the latest edition of the Sustainable Energy Factbook, which we discussed a few weeks ago during a briefing held in partnership with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, nuclear power contributed about 20% of U.S. energy generation in 2020, just as it has for the past 10 years. If you watched that briefing or if you read the fact book, you know that this percentage of U.S. energy generation is not just consistent on a year-to-year basis, but is also consistent relative to other sources. Natural gas and especially renewable energy resources have been on a bigger part of our energy mix while coal remains in decline. This consistent share of energy generation could change in the coming years though, as dozens of nuclear power plants are slated to close in the coming decades, whereas only two are planned for construction. There will be discussions about keeping these plants online, which is an issue our panelists will cover in detail starting in just a few minutes. Questions will abound. What will take the place of nuclear power in the U.S. energy mix? Will it be zero or low carbon? And now what do we do with all these decommissioned power plants and the waste stored on site? These are big, complicated questions. And the answers will have implications for climate change, of course, but also national security, environmental justice and the long-term safety of affected communities, which might not have had much say in the first place about where storage, waste storage decisions are being made. Everyone is concerned about the future of nuclear power, although for different reasons. Some argue that reducing the number of nuclear power plants will make it more difficult to address climate change within an acceptable timeframe. Others point out that the economics of nuclear power and market forces already work, already at work, will answer this whole series of questions for us, especially as it relates to the increasingly competitiveness of renewable energy resources. The big unknown, of course, and the topic at the center of this series of briefings over the last few years involves the fate of all that nuclear waste. Our panelists on the series of briefings have highlighted this issue because it requires a thoughtful, informed policy response. The sort of policy response that only Congress can deliver and then closely monitor to ensure that the policy is carried out as intended. As long as that policy response is missing though, we'll continue doing what we've been doing for too long, pretending that the status quo is good enough. And that is by no means a sustainable climate solution. Before I turn to our panelists, let me explain one last bit of logistics, how to ask questions. We're not together today in person. So if you have a question or two, you have a few ways to ask it. First, you can send us an email to the email address esi at esi.org. You can also send us a message on Twitter at ESI online. We will do our best to get to everyone's questions during our Q and A after our final panelist. And now I get to introduce the first of our panelists today. Tim Judson joined the Nuclear Information and Resource Service in September, 2013 as Associate Director and has served as Executive Director since 2014. Tim leads the nurses work on nuclear reactor and climate change issues. And he's written a series of reports on nuclear bailouts and sustainable energy. Tim chairs the board of the Citizens Awareness Network, one of the lead organizations in the successful campaign to close the Vermont Yankee reactor. And he is co-founder of Alliance for a Green Economy in New York. And it is my privilege, Tim, to welcome you to the briefing today. It's great to see you. Hey, thanks so much, Dan. And thanks for having me today. So I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen and we'll get started. Does that look like it's working? It looks good. Great. So thanks everybody. So I'm gonna give you an introduction to the little known world of nuclear reactor decommissioning. And also to what it has to do with the issues of nuclear waste that are gonna be touched on a little bit more by Leona Morgan later. But to start out with, here's a little overview of what I'm gonna cover. And I'll do it as fast as I can. But nuclear decommissioning is the whole process of what happens to a nuclear power plant after it shuts down permanently. And it essentially involves, these are very large projects. They cost up to a billion dollars or more per reactor and can take anywhere from 20 to 60 years to complete depending on how the company approaches it. But essentially it has to do with dismantling and decontaminating all of the reactor components and buildings and managing that radioactive waste. And then cleaning up and remediating the site. And so one of the things that's sort of lost in the debate over nuclear power and climate is that while nuclear power plants don't release a lot of greenhouse gases at the reactor sites, this is far from a clean industry. And these reactor sites over the years become extremely contaminated with radioactive material both inside the buildings and on the sites. There's radioactive waste that's gotten buried on the sites that we find there's radioactive leaks that are leaking into the local environment. And none of this can really be cleaned up effectively until after the reactor site shuts down and they begin the process of decommissioning. And so decommissioning is really an opportunity for environmental and economic removal for these communities. But it really depends on how decommissioning is regulated and what the standards are. And right now that's not being done very responsible. So again, there's a lot of really important issues with how decommissioning impacts communities. There's a lot of radioactive and toxic waste to clean up. There are real issues with worker health and safety in the work of dismantling and tearing apart these reactors and cleaning up the sites. There are still significant dangers to the nuclear waste that will remain on the reactor sites for decades, the radiated nuclear fuel. There are issues for economic redevelopment both with the loss of property taxes, when the wind of power plant shuts down, and also other means of building up the local economy. And there are very serious issues with environmental justice, both with the so-called low level radioactive waste which is pretty much everything is produced from dismantling the buildings and cleaning up the site to the high level nuclear waste, the irradiated fuel that still has no solution in this country or any other for that matter. This is just a picture of sort of what decommissioning can look like. This is the top two photos are the Yankee Row reactor in Massachusetts which was dismantled in the 1990s. And then the site remediated, that site has still not been able to be released for public use because of residual toxic and radioactive contamination. And then the bottom picture on the right is the Barnwell, South Carolina, low level radioactive waste dump where all of Yankee Row's waste was deposited, which is a 47% African-American low income community. And this waste dump is leaking radioactive material into the local aquifer and water supply. It's a very significant environmental justice issue. So decommissioning, the nuclear regulatory commission is the principal agency responsible for regulating decommissioning. And in the late 80s, as a number of larger reactors began to shut down, the NRC developed regulations that really were in the spirit of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Atomic Energy Act, which provided for, which required planning for decommissioning, approval of those plans, opportunities for the public to request a hearing so the local community could have, so you could ask for a role in assuring that decommissioning was gonna be done responsibly. But in 1993, the NRC dramatically reversed course with the Yankee Row decommissioning and allowed that reactor to be decommissioned without a decommissioning plan and with no opportunity for the public to have a hearing. And the Citizens Awareness Network sued NRC and won on appeal, which sort of overturned what the NRC had done, but after 90% of the decommissioning had taken place. NRC then went back to the drawing board and essentially codified what it did with Yankee Row into new regulations in 1996, which effectively have left the public without any meaningful participation with no hearing rights. There's no approvals needed for decommissioning to proceed until the very end at license termination. There are no regular inspections by the NRC and very lax enforcement. This trend has continued over the last 25 years. Industry has remained, has gone under increasing economic pressure due to shortfalls in the amount of decommissioning funds they've set aside and their concerns about those liabilities hitting their balance sheets after reactors close. So the NRC has been very permissive in granting exemptions to nuclear corporations to use their decommissioning funds for non-decommissioning expenses like taxes, property taxes, illegal fees, and even nuclear waste storage, which is not supposed to be used. The decommissioning funds aren't supposed to be used for those things. And they've also been in the habit of eliminating emergency planning, even though there's extraordinary amounts of radioactivity on site in the irradiated fuel that's stored there. The NRC is now proposing a new rule, essentially to make life easier for the industry, even further by codifying these exemptions that they've been granting so that the industry doesn't have to apply for them anymore with no restoration of opportunities for public involvement. Essentially, they're redefining decommissioning through this proposed rule change to justify further deregulating the process. The communities face a lot of problems through the way the NRC is regulating this. There's false choices presented, such as whether they should proceed with rapid dismantlement, which can be dangerous to workers, or whether they should wait for 60 years to decommission it after the company has built up more money. There's false promises with regard to whether they can really reduce the cost of decommissioning to be able to do it on budget, whether they'll be able to restore the site to a greenfield state, and then sort of promises of false security around the need for emergency planning and the safety of the irradiated fuel on site and whether the irradiated fuel is gonna be removed anytime soon. The industry has a lot of sort of conflicts of interest in this process. They've oftentimes not saved enough money for decommissioning. They're, and then also that the NRC is actually low ball the cost estimates for decommissioning, which makes it look like that enough money has been set aside in many cases when it hasn't. So for instance, when the company gets to providing a site-specific cost estimate for decommissioning rather than the NRC's kind of formulaic estimate, the cost jumps 30 to 60%. And then when they actually get into decommissioning, the cost generally goes up even further. So these companies want to avoid these liabilities for decommissioning, and so they've been searching for a solution for how to get out of it without having to take responsibility for fully decommissioning these sites. There's been a new model of for-profit decommissioning that's come forward recently. There are two companies that have got into the business of buying reactors to decommission them, essentially taking them over and acquiring their decommissioning funds and paying themselves to conduct decommissioning. There are serious bankruptcy risks to states and local communities from this process. The parent companies of these corporations, these consortia are undercapitalized to be able to guarantee that they could complete decommissioning if the decommissioning funds run out. The reactor sites are owned by limited liability corporations that could go bankrupt and essentially leave the whole process in limbo. They're also combining their model of decommissioning with what's called consolidated interim storage or setting up centralized facilities where the irradiated fuel, the high level nuclear waste could be transported to and stored. There are serious risks to consolidated storage. There is, first of all, very serious issues with environmental racism. All of the sites that have been targeted for nuclear waste storage, whether consolidated storage or repositories, are located in Native American or Latinx communities. There's really serious dangers to consolidated storage. First of all, transporting all of this highly irradiated nuclear fuel on our nation's roads and rails through towns throughout the country, passing through, by some estimates, over 380 congressional districts. There's also the reality that even with consolidated storage, waste is going to remain at these reactor sites for decades anyway, relatively unprotected because of the amount of time it's gonna take to transport this waste. And then there's the danger that these CIS facilities could become de facto permanent dumps because the US has still not been able to define a viable long-term repository for the storage of these wastes. There's, what really seems to be driving this is sort of a profiteering model off of nuclear waste. Nuclear corporations are able to sue the Department of Energy for having failed to take ownership of the waste over the last 23 years. And so the federal treasury is putting out about $300 million a year for damages payments to come to nuclear power plant owners for continuing to store their waste. The Holtek and WCS see an opportunity to essentially turn those judgment fund lawsuits into an opportunity to fund them to move the waste to their CIS facilities and get paid to store it there. And in that scenario, there's a real risk that once these companies have taken the nuclear waste from the reactor sites to their centralized facilities and are getting paid to do that, that the decommissioning reactor sites could again be abandoned to left and limbo when the decommissioning funds run. So there's a series, we have a series of recommendations for what should be done to re-regulate decommissioning for community restoration and environmental justice. As I'd say, overarching all of this is that environmental justice needs to be the main frame through which decommissioning and nuclear waste is regulated. And there also need to be real protections for communities, including their hearing rights and secure and safer storage of nuclear waste at the reactor sites for as long as that waste is there. Thanks. Thank you very much, Tim, for your presentation today. We're already getting questions coming in. So I'd like to thank folks in our audience for sending me questions. We're gonna hold them until after our fifth panelist today, but as a reminder, if you have questions for Tim or for the other panelists you're about to hear from, you can send us an email, EESI at ESI.org, you can follow us online on Twitter at EESI online. Also, if you missed anything from Tim's presentation or if you would like to go back and look at his slides and this goes for all of our panelists today, everything will be posted online along with a lot of additional resources that our panelists have provided as additional background materials. So you can always go back and check things out. And of course the archived webcast will be up there too before too long. We get to hear from our second speaker in just a moment and it's my pleasure to introduce Leona Morgan. Leona is an indigenous community organizer and activist who has been fighting nuclear colonialism since 2007. She has focused on preventing new uranium mining, nuclear waste dumping and transport of radioactive materials in the Southwestern United States. She co-founded and works with Hall No, Radiation Monitoring Project, Nuclear Issues Study Group. Leona is from Navajo Nation and she lives in beautiful Albuquerque, New Mexico where I think she's coming to us live today. Leona, it is great to see you and I'll turn it over to you. Thanks so much. Great, thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. I'm just going to start by introducing myself and my language as our people do. My name is Aisha. I speak in English. And I'm from the U.S. I'm from the U.S. I speak in English. So I'm Dinep, as some of you may know us more commonly as Navajo, but our people we call ourselves Dinep. And my presentation is about the consolidated interim storage facilities that Tim just kind of explained a little bit about And I'm gonna go into the real issue about CIS. Consolidated interim storage is a form of nuclear colonialism. And so what is nuclear colonialism? Nuclear, I'm just gonna read this so everyone can hear. Nuclear colonialism is the systematic dispossession of indigenous lands, exploitation of cultural resources and the subjugation and oppression of indigenous peoples to further nuclear production of energy and proliferation of weapons from uranium mining, uranium processing, weapons testing and waste storage resulting in the destruction of indigenous peoples and cultures and the creation of national sacrifice zones. And so we in New Mexico are dealing with many nuclear facilities. As I mentioned, my people are Dinep and you may have heard a lot of news recently about some of the cleanup of uranium mines. Well, this is one of the hugest issues that I'm dealing with and our people have been suffering for generations because of the beginning, what we call the front end of the nuclear fuel chain. So if you can see in this infographic here, some of the stages of nuclear energy production. And the important thing to note is that at every stage of the fuel chain waste is created. And in New Mexico, we don't have a power plant and so one thing I also really wanna emphasize is we're constantly being threatened by new nuclear facilities. And now we're being threatened by this notion that nuclear power is somehow going to save the climate. Nuclear power is not a solution to climate change. It actually makes climate change worse taking resources away from true renewables and other forms of energy. And the reason why is because if you look at this infographic, the carbon footprint of nuclear is calculated only at the power plant. They discount all of the previous stages and the storage of waste, which will be forever. And so going back to uranium mining, there's over 15,000 abandoned uranium mines in the United States that were predominantly for the weapons program and the push for imperialism of the United States all over the world. So we're dealing with mostly abandoned mines in the West. As you can see on this map, this just shows where the uranium is. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about the uranium issue just for a minute because this is something that has not been taken care of by the federal government, the way the federal government deals with issues of uranium mining, especially cleaning up the old mines. And these were mines that were left before there was standards in place to enforce remediation after a company had mined. And so all of the mines that were left, there's no law to clean them up. And so the government tries to find responsible parties suing companies and getting settlements to do like patchwork cleanup. Right now the Navajo Nation is one of the few places that is getting cleanup and we have over 500 abandoned uranium mines on Navajo, but the process of cleanup is just keeping it in place and burying it permanently. So ultimately resulting in 523 permanent waste sites. And this is not acceptable. We did not ask for these uranium mines. We didn't approve these uranium mines. And yet the federal government does not take responsibility for the mess that it made. The responsible party is the federal government and the federal government should foot the bill for the cleanup. And so this is just an example of how we've been treated by the federal government for its own purposes. And so again, our nation is getting some cleanup. However, there's still 15,000 across the country that need to be dealt with. And so this is just an example of policy that needs to be changed or created in order for the United States to address the waste issue from the front end of the nuclear fuel chain. Now I'm gonna go and move forward to what we call the back end of the nuclear fuel chain. Excuse me. So consolidated interim storage. Right now we are being threatened by not one but two proposals of storage of waste from nuclear power plants. And the two proposals are by Poltec International and another company, which is actually a partnership called Interim Storage Partners, but it's a partnership between Waste Control Specialists and a French company, Orano USA. And right now these two proposals have gone through most of the NEPA process already. We've already gone through the scoping, the draft EIS and we're expecting some type of official final EIS and decision from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this summer. Right now, Poltec's process is being delayed because they have some issues. There's more requests for additional information from the NRC, which is a little bit upsetting because we asked the NRC to pause the process because of the international pandemic. We're in the middle of a health emergency, yet the NRC just went forward with both proposals and we even challenged both proposals legally. Our organization, the Nuclear Issue Study Group is part of a seven group coalition of organizations under Don't Waste Michigan, formerly opposing Poltec and also ISP. And both of the court cases right now are on hold. We've gone through the challenge under the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Atomic Safety and Licensing Board and the three judge panel threw out all of the contentions. First, they didn't grant standing to any of the opposition, which was from several community groups, including a local environmental organization called Alliance for Environmental Strategies, which is the local organization with residents that live down here in the Southeast part of New Mexico. So AFIS, Sierra Club, Beyond Nuclear, Don't Waste Michigan and a couple industry groups, we've all challenged these proposals and they've gone through, like I said, the ASLB three judge panel and then that was appealed to the five commissioners who basically rubber stamped what the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board judges decided, which was not to accept any of our arguments. And now we're just waiting for our appeal to go to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. And so some of those contentions are first and foremost that CIS is illegal. And of course, the environmental justice impacts, if you look at this map, you can see all of the nuclear power plants where the waste was generated is mostly in the coastal regions. And in New Mexico, we don't even have a nuclear power plant. So if we overlap the two maps, you can see how uranium was extracted from the West and then the energy that was created benefited people in other parts of the country. And now a lot of those communities, and I understand the concern the communities have about safety for holding that waste, but just imagine what our concern is when we're being threatened by holding all of the waste from every single reactor in the country, not to mention the transport issues of everyone in between. And so looking at the two proposals, I wanna remind you how the United States treated us in light of the uranium mining issue. And so we're aware that both proposals are designed to be temporary, so-called interim, which means the United States has no solution for what to do with the waste. We know Yucca is a failed project and it's most likely never going to take waste. And so we're looking at two designs for temporary storage that, as Tim mentioned, could become permanent storage. And this is one of the issues that the New Mexico attorney general has brought up as the state of New Mexico is suing the United States for what they're claiming is eminent and substantial endangerment, which these two proposals will definitely impact not just the human population, but all of our plant and animal relatives, as well as the environment or water resources and right now the economy in New Mexico. So I'm just gonna show you a couple of maps that demonstrate how this region can be affected if waste is brought here. These are two maps. I'll put the links in the chat. You have the state of New Mexico on the left with all of the nuclear facilities and other extractive industry denoted by the little icons. And then when you focus on the southern part, especially the southeastern part of New Mexico, this is the Permian basin, which is a huge oil and gas developing region. And again, this is one of the arguments regarding the economy and some of the complaints and the opposition is also from our state land commissioner because Holtec was not 100% truthful when talking about the ownership of some of the land and this is a huge issue because the state land commissioner identified this untruth by NRC. By Holtec within the NRC ASLB hearing back in January, 2018. So you can see all of the oil and gas development. And when you look at a map on Google Maps, I'm gonna just invite you to search in Google for Laguna Gatuna, which is an ephemeral body of water adjacent to the Holtec site. We don't call it the Holtec site. The Holtec site will never be built if we can help it. We have lots of opposition across the state, but you can see it's only 13 miles from the website, which is also proposing expansions and then 40 miles from the WCS site as well as the Urenco Enrichment Facility. And then there's some other developments of nuclear facilities proposed in Hobbes. So we have several nuclear facilities in the Southeast part of the state not to mention the overwhelming amount of over 1500 mines that produce uranium in New Mexico and two national nuclear labs. But when you switch the Google map from the map view to the satellite view, you can see the network of all the oil and gas developments right within the same region, which is a huge problem and will cause a lot of concern when we're dealing with fracking and there's even a sinkhole nearby, there's been tornadoes and a lot of health, I mean, I'm sorry, extreme weather occurrences. And so just to leave you all with this thought, just to summarize and wrap up, CIS is illegal, which is one of our contentions and it violates environmental justice, especially in New Mexico, a state that is a majority people of color state. And so again, we have lots of opposition, not just from our state land commissioner and governor, now the attorney general and the state as a whole, but from all of the indigenous nations in New Mexico, including the Pueblos as well as the Navajo Nation. And so I'll just conclude there and I'll be happy to answer any questions. Thank you. Thank you, Leona. Thanks so much for your presentation. We're gonna turn now to our third panelist. Paul Gunter is the director of the Reactor Oversight Project at Beyond Nuclear, a nonprofit public interest organization based in Tacoma Park, Maryland. He is an environmental activist and energy policy analyst with a focus on nuclear power issues since 1975. Paul, welcome to the briefing today. I'll turn it over to you. Tim gave a good explanation of what we typically think of decommissioning, but what I'd like to offer is some insights on how decommissioning currently holds a lot of secrets for operating experience of nuclear power stations and particularly the effects of aging as we move through more and more extremes of license extension. Next slide, please. There's an adage of, with many attributions, you can't manage what you don't measure. What you're looking at are two slides of the Davis-Bessie Nuclear Power Station in Oak Harbor, Ohio. These are slides taken during the first 40 years of the Davis-Bessie Nuclear Power Station operations specifically from the year 2000 on the slide on the left. Obviously something's going wrong here. In fact, what's happened is that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the operator, First Energy, have failed to measure the cracking that's going on in the penetration sleeves of this operating reactor's reactor pressure vessel head. This slide was taken just before the Davis-Bessie Nuclear Power Station went on a 24 month operating cycle and for another cruise through the fissioning of the atom and what you're looking at on the left is about 18 months later when the refueling outage began, they noticed that there was a crater in the side in the top of the reactor pressure vessel that was about, you could fit a pineapple in it and this is where the operating at a 2000 pounds per square inch, the bore rated reactor coolant was pressurized out of the reactor pressure vessel and concentrated boric acid on the top of the reactor pressure vessel which over the course of time had eaten a hole and you're looking at the top of the stainless steel corrosive resistant liner that was bulging out into this cavity. We were within as much as eight weeks of a loss of coolant accident that basically is because the industry and the regulator had failed to calculate how quick cracks can grow in this facility. Next slide please. But age management is more safety critical as these operating license extensions become more extreme. This gives you an overview of where we are right now, 24 units in operation, 85 of those units are now approved or operating within a 40 to 60 year extension period. We have four units that are now approved for a second license renewal to 60 to 80, more applications underway and the discussions have started for the industry and the agency to look at an 80 to 100 year extension and increasing that relicensing interval from 20 to 40 years at the same time where the actors are closing. Next slide please. This is from a contract that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission entered into with one of the national labs to essentially conduct autopsies on this growing number of decommissioning nuclear power stations, principally because they cannot get the age management information from the operating fleet. So they want to harvest and do laboratory analysis on the experiential real world materials. This would be concrete, metal, internal, this electrical cable where in many cases the environmental degradation of these materials is incomplete. Next slide please. The contract is explicit. The NRC wanted the national lab to identify and document information and technical gaps like how quick cracks can grow. They wanted in identifying those gaps to include the industry practices to try to assure the retention of design margins during the licensing extension process and recommend experimental and analytical model development. So these deliverables were to be made available through technical letter reports in this case through PNNL. Next slide please. The biggest challenges focus on these areas of degrading mechanisms. Neutron embrittlement of the reactor pressure vessel, irradiation assisted degradation of internals, concrete and containment degradation and electrical cable qualification and condition assessment. Next slide please. That report was initially released by PNNL in this technical letter published in December, 2017 and it was quite explicit. They identified technical knowledge gaps about 60 times in this report identifying that these gaps basically are need of the the analysis and that there were two critical areas for calibrating and validating the current accelerated testing procedures and also to look at the combined synergistic effects. So these basically focus again on crack initiation and crack growth rates. Next slide please. So how did, and then there were these two recommendations that will according to PNNL they would require these laboratory studies. And so it was explicit that the harvesting and lab work was to be required according to PNNL. Next slide. How did the NRC respond? Basically in a critique that was offered by the NRC in an anonymous session, they said that these all references in the report should be scrubbed. And if this report was issued that in fact they would, the NRC would need to show a stronger basis for how they were allowing these extensions to occur before harvesting and testing was completed. Next slide please. The, in fact, as we found the report published on three government websites, the PNNL website, it was also on the Department of Energy's website and it was also on the International Atomic Energy Agency's website. So we started raising questions in NRC technical meetings at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. And within a couple of days of that round of questioning the NRC pulled this technical letter report from all three public websites. And in so doing they did not provide in their scrubbed revision, which was published in March to April 2019, they didn't provide any commentary on how they treated deleting these recommendations or to delete the PNNL requirement as had been made clear through the contract. Next slide please. So in, despite the fact that these questions continue and that the agency has deleted the initial report, published a scrubbed report, these license extensions are proceeding. In fact, Duke Energy is basically declared that they're going to seek a 60 to 80 year license extension for their entire fleet of 11 reactors. So this is in fact a problem that we're facing now. So we'd like to see the qualifying science scrutinized given the deletions. And we're suggesting these actions here through the government accountability office or the science through government congressional hearings. Thank you. Thank you very much Paul for your presentation today. We are going to next here from Ben Wheeler. Ben is a research associate at the work group for economic and infrastructure policy at the Berlin Institute of Technology. He is a guest researcher for the German Institute of Economic Research. I know that's not what it's called in German but I'll spare everyone my terrible pronunciation, as well as a scholar of the Heinrich Bolsch-Duffing Center. His field of research is nuclear power economics with a focus on decommissioning, radioactive waste management, nuclear power plant new build, the dual use issues of nuclear power. Ben, welcome from Europe. It's great to see you today and I'll turn it over to you. Thank you very much for the kind introduction and thanks for having me. Yes, thanks Paul. I will give you a brief overview where we'll talk about two issues on first issues, nuclear waste management in Europe, especially Germany and Switzerland. And then we're going to talk about the economics of small modular reactors. Just to give you, I will skip this as we had already this presentation. I just wanted to give an overview on what we are talking about, all the spent fuel installations in the US and how they look like, just as I'm going to show you some pictures from Germany and Switzerland. I want to show this one. This is at Connecticut Yankee. So these are the storage installations which are going to be spent, going to be, yeah, we have them for several decades and they are distributed all over the US. So at this point, I want to just point to this publication which we published two years ago or one half years ago, which is Nuclear Waste Report, which deals with Europe, but there's also a counter case study by Alison McFarland on the situation in the US. It covers all the waste management issues in Europe. So in Germany, here you see above an interim storage facility in Germany. It's a centralized, we had before 2012, we had three large centralized interim storage facilities. They were operated by utilities own subsidiary, subsidiary storage. And we also have since then, with the change of law, we have now interim storage and decentralized interim storage facilities. This means we have storage facilities like the one above at each reactor side. And here the utilities have to spend their waste. In addition, as there was an introduction of a nuclear waste fund, like the one in the US, where the utilities pay into the liability was changed. Now all this interim facilities were on our liable operated by a federally owned company to be a good set, which means federal company for interim storage. So now the money is at the side of the federal regulator and we have, it's always, it's also done by the public companies. It's different tactical concepts. We have storage cars, but also a hall where they are stored in, which is passively cooled. And since 2011, we have retrofitting measures. You can see above there has been some, some experts waste concerns about the safety of these halls. And now we have, there are now building walls around facilities, especially due to terrible issues. We have stayed some ongoing issues. Independent experts argue that the measures are still applied too slowly and not another, in fact, not enough. We still have some unresolved issues. We have, we have still no hot side, which is a big discussion in Germany. And just to give this as a reference to the US case, here is a short, this was built as a short-term solution to dealing with high level waste. According to the new law, we expected until 2050, we would have an operation high level waste facility. And then until then, and up until since then, since starting the 2040s, the span fuel would be moved to this central waste management facility. In Switzerland, it's nearly the same on how they deal with the nuclear waste. It's also sick cars, storage cars, which are also transport cars. These are the same cars as in Germany. We have also one centralized entrance storage facility. One difference to Germany is that, that it's operated again with utilities, the same technical concept. And you can see the centralized entrance of storage facility below. It's one huge complex that has an advantage. It includes a conditioning plant where you can handle the waste. It has a storage hall and it has a hot set. So all the needed facilities are at one place. But from the technical concepts, it's the same as in Germany. We have concrete, massive storage cars combined with a hall and combined with safety wards. And if you enter this facility, it's quite amazing because you don't see it from this point of view, but you have the floor slightly in the anger. So they say that this is done for example, if you have a plane crash into it, that all the carousel and the fuel would leave the building. So this was my short presentation on the German and the Switzerland case studies. And I was also part by for, we did an in German report for the German nuclear regulatory agency, agency on the small modular reactors. It was done by economists and done by physicists. As I'm an economist, I will start with the key economic findings. First of all, if you look at the specific construction costs, the cost per kilowatt of installed capacity they are of course higher. You lose the economies of scale if you build small modular reactors. This is the SMR's proponents argue that this is going to be overbalanced with shorter production times and the modularity. Initially, like this supposed to be industrial mass produced. So the loss of economies of scale would be counterbalanced by this. But we did also production cost calculation. We looked at the past nuclear reactor construction time. So the large ones, we looked at the mass and learning effects from the nuclear industry and we calculated that in order to break even a reactor when they had that least to produce around 3000 SMRs to break even to break it was while entering the small modular reactor production. This is of course, it's not expected that the structural cost is a bunch of small capacity reactors can be compensated by this by learning or mass effects from our point of view. Again, if you look at the industry as with large capacity nuclear plants supply of reactors is predominantly government owned or demand led by the end users, but in some case by the military. We have some spin-offs from government funded large scale research institutions, but all the business models are basing on long-term government funding. In the US, this is especially the case but also internationally in Russia. For example, you have Russian companies, state companies building the reactors. It's very state dominated. We have another justifications for the small modular reactors is that shorter construction times are expected. But if you look at the plans which are currently under construction or in operation, this assumption did not appear to be found. One point I also mean one to stress is that if you look at the most advanced SMR concepts, these are not brand new concepts. These are old concepts. These are small light water reactors. In fact, large water reactors small output and here no startups are involved. You see here in the top news scale is often presented as a startup, behind news scale is Floor, a major nuclear company. They're also new just to sum up. It's nothing new, it's the basic. It's all nuclear concepts, reactor concepts and it's the same old nuclear industry. They have new players like behind SMR LLC. You have Holtec, which has never designed a reactor. So overall and in yellow, you see also the connections to the big research labs. So it's no real private industry involved. It's an old nuclear power industry and it's nearly everything government funded. So nonetheless, we had some physicists aboard and I will briefly go into detail on some key safety findings. Very safety risks are largely neglected in the planning. This especially questions regarding transport, dismantling, instrument, final storage. Final storage is a big issue because some reactor concepts are using other fuels and the ones we are used to, it increases the final storage issue. We have special applications, scenarios, they often require new regulatory approaches. We have until now no specific national or international safety standards. There are some arguments that they are potentially have safer because they have a smaller radioactive inventory, but however, we're talking about a large number of reactors. This of course increases the risk many times over. The safety concept which I propose are also pursued for cost efficiency. It isn't also contributes an increase in risk. And lastly, some SMR designs would run on unconventional fuels. As I mentioned, this includes higher enriched uranium, plutonium, repossess spent fuel and of course this raises the proliferation risk. So thank you very much for your time and I'm looking forward to discussion later on. Thank you very much, Ben. Thanks for your presentation today. Just as a quick reminder, the questions are rolling in. We won't be able to get all of them today but we'll do our best to get to a few of them for sure and give all of our panelists an opportunity to answer. If you have questions and you'd like to get them in in the queue, you can send them in to an email address EESI.org can also follow us on Twitter at EESI online. And if you've missed anything, whether it's from Tim's presentation, Leona's presentation, Paul's presentation, Ben's presentation or Amry's presentation, which we'll hear in just a moment, you can visit us online, www.esa.org for archived webcast presentation materials and a whole lot of other resources. And that brings us to our final panelist of the day, Amry Lovens is a physicist and adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. He's the co-founder and chairman emeritus of RMI. He's an advisor to major firms and governments in more than 70 countries and has been doing that for many decades. Author of 31 books, more than 700 papers. He's an integrative designer of super efficient buildings, factories and vehicles. I wish we had time today. He could tell us about his passive house. He's received many of the world's leading energy and environmental awards and his thinking has influenced the way we get electricity in our homes and businesses. Amry, thank you for joining our briefing today. I'll turn it over to you. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Thank you. Good day. I thank ESI for sponsoring this event and each of you for kindly joining it. Today, I'm honored to offer my personal views on nuclear power's status, prospects and role in climate protection. A widespread and bipartisan view holds that continued and expanded use of nuclear power can help reduce climate change. I'll show that that is incorrect because of nuclear power's most important but least discussed attribute its economics. My analysis does not count any past, present or future emissions from nuclear activities. Nor will I address relative risks. If nuclear power has neither a business case nor a climate benefit, it falls at the first hurdle and any other issues are relevant only to managing risks already created. In 2020, US renewables, mostly wind and solar have produced coal power. Renewables also surpass nuclear power's current and historic peak output. In the upper left graph, you can see the green line crossing the red and black lines. The other two graphs detail the shares. Efficient use of electricity could do the same or better if fully competed or compared with supply. It's far easier to decarbonize the electricity system if we also use electricity in a way that saves money. RMI's 2011 business synthesis reinventing fire showed how the US could use electricity four times more productively by 2050 with 2010 technologies costing a 10th today's price of electricity. Such productive use could quadruple the share of a given amount of renewables and yet most states still reward utilities for selling you more electricity and penalize them for cutting your bill. US story of dwindling nuclear relevance echoes the worlds. The global reactor fleet just regained its 2002 peak capacity. Its output probably remains below the 2006 peak. The nuclear share of global electricity peaked in 1996 at 18% then shrank to 10%. Most new reactors are in China shown in yellow but they're missing their targets and losing official favor because modern renewables are bigger, faster and also far cheaper as noted in red. So China doubled its renewable additions last year adding more wind capacity than the world added the year before. As China's nuclear order fades so do other countries additions. The total additions you can see at the lower right are being overtaken by retirements the round bars below the axis. So the fleet struggles to sustain itself. Last year China added two nuclear gigawatts and 120 solar and wind gigawatts. In both 2019 and 2020, world nuclear capacity gained it at best one gigawatt net of retirements depending on how you count the timing while renewable capacity grew by about 200 gigawatts per year. Wind and solar power have lately added more capacity about every two days the nuclear power adds in a year. Their average capacity factors differ only by several fold. The international energy agency says 90% of the world's net capacity additions last year were renewable due mainly to their plummeting unsubsidized costs graphed here by Bloomberg new energy finance based on about 13,000 actual projects worldwide. Bazaar finds the same for the United States with wind power, aqua, solar gold widening their lead over gas and pink while new nuclear costs in purple keep rising. So on the right, world nuclear output in purple stagnated and coal power in black headed down while non-hydro renewables in green outgrew even gas generation and added over two trillion kilowatt hours a year in a decade. IEA says those renewables plus hydropower in blue produced 29% of world electricity last year and will rise to 47 to 72% by 2040 while nuclear sticks around 10%. This pattern repeats nearly worldwide particularly in China and India. Let me highlight two other examples often misrepresented. Germany's nuclear phase out in purple agreed two decades ago and set to conclude next year accompanied major fossil fuel reductions in red and increased power exports in teal. These three shifts were offset by electrical savings in aqua plus renewables in green while the economy grew and total greenhouse gas emissions fell 53%. In 2020, wind power loanout generated coal plus lignite Germany's power sector met its 2020 climate goal a year early that is before the pandemic and with 5 percentage points to spare. Japan's utilities replaced lost nuclear output in red largely with fossil fuels in black while national policies suppressed renewables especially wind power and shielded legacy assets from competition. More than a third of Japan's nuclear capacity has now closed most of the rest remains in limbo as utilities credibility and financial strength. Yet in nine years after the Fukushima disaster renewables in green plus savings in blue displaced 150% of Japan's lost nuclear output if adjusted for GDP growth 108% if not adjusted thus Japan's old nuclear market vanished before more reactors could restart if restart had a business case. In the first three fourths of the current fiscal year nuclear and fossil fuels fell even faster as renewables grew to 23% of Japan's generation the official target for 10 years later. So given these trends how should we compare different ways to power America's economy from now on? Well, we built coal fired power plants by counting costs but not carbon. Nuclear power is promoted by counting carbon but not cost but to protect the climate we must save the most carbon at the least cost and in the least time counting all three variables carbon and cost and time. Costlier or slow options save less carbon per dollar or per year than cheaper or faster options.  I've posted a simple way to compare climate effectiveness in a Forbes article submitted for the record and documented by detailed analysis that I'll now sketch. Any analysts ignore a common sense comparisons of cost and speed leading to results akin to arguing that since people are hungry, hunger is urgent and caviar and rice are both food. Therefore both caviar and rice are vital to reducing hunger. Since in reality money and time are both limited our priorities in feeding people or in providing energy services must be informed by relative cost and speed. Lower cost saves more carbon per dollar, faster deployment saves more carbon per year and we need both these outcomes. The economic principle of opportunity cost means you can't spend the same money on two different things at the same time each purchase foregoes others. Buying nuclear power displaces buying efficiency and renewables and vice versa. So nuclear owners strive to beat coal and natural gas while their allies often disparage or suppress renewables. Yet despite subsidies that rival construction costs most US nuclear plants including all 16 in the PJM power pool are uneconomic just to run. Many are closing so their powerful owners see can often get multi-billion dollar bailouts from malleable or in some states apparently corrupt state legislators. Congress is often asked to federalize these new subsidies and add new ones but reducing or replacing market choices with political log rolling, distorts prices, crowds out competitors, slows innovation, reduces transparency, rewards undue influence, introduces bias, picks winners, invites corruption and even threatens to destroy the competitive regional electric markets where renewables and efficiency win. These violations of the conservative economic principles I favor seem high prices to bear for smaller negative benefits. Yet many political leaders of both parties think climate urgency demands every option including preserving nuclear power at any cost. So what is that cost? Last October the eminent 173 year old financial house Lazard published its latest annual snapshot of electricity sources US market prices. I've edited the slides title in red because Lazard removed renewables temporary tax credits but tacitly retained non-renewables larger permanent subsidies especially to nuclear power. I've colored Lazard's solar and wind power costs in green and I've added in Aqua US utilities typical costs way at the bottom of customers electric efficiency credited in blue for avoiding remote sources delivery costs and losses because end use efficiency is already delivered. So new nuclear plants in red are grossly uncompetitive with efficiency and renewables. That's why the private capital market will finance more reactors and why they're not bid into open auctions. The coal rose vertical black line showing coal plants operating cost in 2018 cannot beat the green renewables either. So coal power is dwindling followed by new gas power. The other leading data sources show similar renewable costs although Bloomberg's nuclear costs are much higher than Lazards. Nuclear costs are also rising renewable costs are falling and historical experience doesn't warm investor sentiment of the 259 power reactors ordered in the US just 94 remain and by mid 2017 only 28 units or 11% of the original orders got built remained competitive in their regional markets and had not suffered at least one outage lasting a year or more in the oil business that's called an 89% dry hole risk. A bigger question is whether the world's 400 odd existing reactors should stay open. Many costs more to run than their output can earn or that it would cost to provide the same services by building and operating new renewables or efficiency improvements. So let's examine reactors competitiveness by going step by step through an eye chart about actual nuclear operating costs the cost that need not be paid if the plant does not operate. So the light green zone shows the range of US wholesale electricity prices 2003-18 in constant $2014. The Aqua line for wind power and the gold line for utility scale photovoltaics solar power show the average prices set a long-term private market power purchase agreements or PPAs. You can see the average new wind and solar power sell at or below the lowest wholesale prices from non-renewables and they're trending downward. So wind power in 2018 averaged under $20 a megawatt hour and was as low as 11 or 1.1 cents a kilowatt hour. Wind and solar power's temporary national subsidies now phasing out, don't change the basic outcome. The lower right corner of the graph shows us round dots the comparable unsubsidized prices of wind and solar in Chile, Mexico, Morocco, Portugal and Saudi Arabia. The squares are bids for Colorado solar and wind, the diamonds add electricity storage with only modest costs. So now let's compare the red line US nuclear plants average operating costs that excludes all construction costs. You can see that average nuclear operations cost more than new modern renewables with or without their temporary subsidies. During the latest reported periods the gray and brown horizontal bars show that those average nuclear operating costs by quartile fell as the least competitive reactors were closed but renewable prices fell even faster. Nuclear operating costs will be hard to cut much further in US reactors averaging over 40 years old but renewable prices promise strong further declines for decades to come. International nuclear operating costs tend to be even higher. Troubled fleets like trances in Japan's must spread their operating cost over less output and often must buy costly post Fukushima upgrades from which NRC has largely exempted US operators. These operating costs data reveal an important climate opportunity. The latest reported operating costs for OPEX by quartile for 2014 to 16 exceeds four cents a kilowatt hour for the costlier to run half of US reactors or five cents for the costliest quartile making the money losers. Yet electric efficiency cost utilities only two or three cents a kilowatt hour on average less if they shop carefully. Therefore closing a top quartile cost nuclear plant and buying efficiency instead would save several times as much carbon as continuing to run the nuclear plant. Owners could volunteer or regulators require or market solicit that substitution and renewables should compete too. Thus, while we close coal plants to save carbon directly we should also close distressed nuclear plants and reinvest their large saved operating costs in cheaper options to save carbon indirectly. Replacing a closed nuclear plant with efficiency or renewables empirically takes only one to three years. If owners don't give such advanced notice a common tactic to extort subsidies by making closure more disruptive then more natural gas might temporarily be burned for typically a year or two but then will be more than offset by cheaper carbon-free replacements. California's biggest utility will therefore replace its well-running Diablo Canyon reactors with least cost carbon-free resources to save money and carbon and to help the grid work better. To get these outcomes, we must track not just carbon but also money and time. Investing judiciously, not indiscriminately saves the most carbon per dollar. So what about per year? Well, claims that nuclear generation grows much faster than renewables making nuclear important for climate use cherry picked old data and a strange methodology based on not absolute but per capita growth. This makes the climate benefit depend on the population of the country where it occurs. So Sweden and Slovakia look a lot more important than China. Ironically, all nine old nuclear programs shown in blue are now troubled and the fastest one in Sweden per capita is now adding wind power even faster. So this widely reprinted graph comes from a 2016 paper in the journal Science but once I had corrected that paper seven analytic flaws and distortions in two peer review journals that finding reversed. Even using the same flawed methodology and the same data source updated four years nuclear output in red and non-hydro renewable output the other colors can actually grow at similar speeds. If unlike the science authors we compare nuclear in 10 countries with renewable growth in the same 10 countries renewable screw faster in seven of those 10. But the rapid renewable sorry, the rapid nuclear growth occurred decades ago under conditions that no longer exist while comparable or faster renewable growth is here now and accelerating. Nuclear power slowness incurs a big carbon penalty even bigger because it also needs three times more lead time for institutional preparations. So renewables can start saving carbon many years sooner and being later slower and costlier than its competitors makes nuclear power triply unhelpful for climate. Or simply we could just compare different technologies total growth in global electricity production. And then we see that modern renewables nearly quadrupled their output in a decade pulled ahead of stagnant nuclear power in purple two years ago that are growing faster than the nuclear power ever did. In the past decade says the international energy agency renewables were six times more effective than cold to gas fuel switching and five times more effective than nuclear growth in reducing power sector carbon emissions. Enthusiasts claim that substituting various kinds of small modular reactors will achieve competitive costs but that takes magical thinking and today's reactors are the wrong competitor. Early SMRs would produce electricity at about twice the cost of today's light water reactors which Lazard found are three to eight times costlier than modern renewables or five to 10 times costlier than on-site efficiency. But by the time SMRs if successful could begin mass production their carbon free rivals are said to get another twofold cheaper based on observed learning curves which nuclear power has never demonstrated. So just do the math, two times three to eight times two means mass production must make SMRs about 12 to 32 times cheaper or 12 to 52 times using Bloomberg cost figures neither range is plausible. SMRs can't catch up because small modular renewables which do scale down well have decades head start and exploiting their own formidable economies of scaling and learning. Novel reactor designs or fuel cycles offer no escape because even if the minor nuclear part of the prohibitive total capital cost of today's reactors were free the non-nuclear remainder the great majority of the costs would still be about two to six times two costly to compete. Nor could SMRs be developed and scaled fast enough to meet the urgent decarbonization need that their advocates rightly claim. SMRs would only divert investment attention and time from off the shelf popular benign competing technologies that have already proven rapidly scalable and that win a half trillion dollars of private investment each year. Substituting costly slow SMRs would thus make climate change worse. If you haven't heard this economic thesis before now you have published in peer review journals since the 80s it's been sometimes attacked but never rebutted perhaps because the industry doesn't want to draw it to your attention. I do respectfully suggest you consider it and I invite you to start counting carbon and money and time. So to summarize carbon free is necessary but not sufficient we also need cheap and fast. Actual market prices and deployment speeds mean that new nuclear plants would save many full less carbon per dollar and per year than cheaper faster efficiency or modern renewables. Operating money losing existing nuclear plants waste money that could buy cheaper options saving even more carbon. Merge and you think climate change is less sense it makes to keep running those uneconomic reactors. No proposed changes in size technology or fuel cycle would change these conclusions. They're intrinsic to all nuclear technologies. Now climate non-solution isn't worth paying for let alone extra and nuclear power also offers no benefits for grid reliability or resilience justifying special treatment. I provided for the record some extra evidence on why traditional so-called baseload generation by big thermal plants is no longer necessary desirable or economic and why we don't need a storage miracle. The ultra reliable former East German grid Fimpsley-Kaetz is already more than half powered by wind and solar over 60% by renewables without adding bulk storage they plan to be 100% renewable by 2032. Some European countries with modest or no hydropower are already half to three quarters or more renewably powered without adding bulk storage and with reliability far better than America's. We can explore these issues further in discussion and I thank you for your kind attention. Thank you Amri for your presentation today. And as Amri said there are lots of additional resources as well as present presentation materials online www.esa.org. We have probably about time for two questions and we're gonna do our best to involve all of our panelists. So panelists if you'd like to put your videos back on if hopefully you're still with us and we'll go through. I think we're gonna start with a question about current event and Tim we'll start with you and we'll go through the order of the presentations if anyone has any comments. Today actually more or less while we're having this briefing today was the first meeting of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and climate change will obviously be a major topic of discussion not just the challenge of climate change but also the solutions of climate change. Tim starting with you and then we'll go through Lenora, et cetera. Do you have any comments about the first meeting of the Environmental Justice Advisory Council and any suggestions about how people participating in that event might wanna view the issues that we've discussed today? Sure, thanks dad. Well, I think first I'm sorry to miss it but I'm very glad to be here with all of you today but this is a really hardening development and such a long delayed but welcome change in federal government approach to environmental justice and really excited to see what the advisory council was able is going to do. We would encourage them to look really closely at the environmental justice issues with the whole nuclear fuel chain from uranium mining to nuclear waste storage and decommissioning as well as the special role that nuclear power generation plays within driving that. And so for them to be able to put an environmental justice lens on the climate solutions that the Biden administration and Congress are going to be separately pursuing seems really vital because the reality is that just like communities that are dealing with fossil fuel pollution, communities and indigenous nations that are dealing with uranium mining and radioactive waste contamination are suffering and we need to say we need to solve the climate crisis to make this planet sustainable. And that's in that sustainability has to include the health of our environment, which nuclear power and the whole nuclear fuel chain dramatically impacts and in all the same sort of unjust and inequitable ways that we're becoming more aware of are endemic to the fossil fuel industry. The same is true with the nuclear industry. Thanks dad, do you wanna? Yeah, like Tim said, it's long overdue. The first thing to recognize is that environmental justice is what the work that I do and many, many other people to combat environmental racism. And so as an indigenous person, this country was founded upon racist policy, including genocide and relocation. And I don't know if people understand that this is not history. This is present day, ongoing genocide and relocation, especially when our lands are contaminated by radioactive waste and our waters are contaminated. We've seen this play out, especially recently with the pandemic, the uranium contamination and other extractive industries, especially on Navajo led to a lack of water, contaminated water and our people were severely impacted by the pandemic. This is just one example. And I wanna also highlight that the environmental justice principles, people can just Google that. This was a document created by people of color coming together over 30 years ago. And so I know the anniversary of the actual gathering would be in October of this year. And so for 30 years, people have before, even going back to, I like to acknowledge Popay who did a lot of organizing in the 17th century. I mean, that's probably one of the first examples of environmental justice work when the Spanish came into New Mexico. And we continue this ongoing tradition as indigenous peoples, learning from our ancestors and using our strength from our various cultures. But environmental justice, I know is something for everyone. We, I know Grijalvola from Arizona is also introducing the E.J. for all bill. And so these, a lot of work is long overdue and we really need to not just clean up uranium lines but clean up all pollution that was created in communities of color that didn't ask for it and didn't approve it yet. We're the people dying from these industries today. Thank you, Paul. For the sake of time, I'll concur with Tim and Leona. Ben, do you have any comments before we go to Henry? I just wanted to say then, I cannot comment on the issue, but I just want to say from a country which is terminating or closing its last reactor, nuclear power plant in a year and a half, that there is, so there are so many issues with nuclear power going forward. Even if you are closing the reactors, we're just, there's no real phase out of nuclear. We have been operating for several decades and now we are confronted with decades of decommissioning, waste management and unresolved issues. And I just want to say from a country it's decided by law, there's no real phase out of nuclear. Thanks. Henry? Well, I don't think I have anything to add and I made my views clear about how to make wise climate decisions to make sure the world stays habitable for all beings. Great, thank you. So our last question for the discussions period today, we'll go back again Tim and we'll sort of go through the list or go through the roster. Today, we've heard about this issue from lots of different perspectives and I think it's been pretty clearly communicated that this is an issue, multifaceted issue that there's a lot of attention from a lot of different angles. Risk of community, risk to communities, excuse me, but also it's worth considering or reconsidering this set of technologies as a climate solution just from the start. But the issue is dynamic and things change over time and as Anne Marie, some of your slides indicated that at different points, the economics were different based on sort of the countries and the time scales in one of your final slides. I'd like to ask you sort of put your solutions hat on for a moment and think toward the future. And maybe are there one or two things or two events or things that may or may not come about as more and more nuclear plants are shut down and decommissioned as climate change, the threat, the urgency continues to accelerate? Are there technological developments you're on the lookout for? What are the things you're looking for that will potentially allow this debate to evolve even further and hopefully provide some clarity with respect to a policy response? And Ben, I appreciate that this is primarily focused on a US audience, but perhaps when we get to you, you could share a little bit of background about how the debate in Europe has evolved as things have changed over there as well. But Tim, we'll start with you and what are the key policy developments? What are the key technological developments? What are the key economic developments on the horizon that you'll be looking out for to help you understand where this issue is gonna go? Well, I mean, I think to start with, I mean, I would return to Emery's presentation and the data that's already sort of played out, which is to show that the superior economics and performance of renewable energy and energy efficiency relative to nuclear power and fossil fuels, I think shows that the solutions to climate change are less technological at this point and more political. And that has to do with the way the decision-making is done with respect to our energy choices. And so when it comes to the state-level policy-making processes that happen at the utility commissions and the legislatures, which is really where most decision-making about our electricity supply happens, that's the utility companies that are really the 800-pound gorillas in the state legislatures. And so they are representing their interests in managing how the policy is gonna affect them. And so that's where we've got real problems with renewables not being able to scale fast enough with nuclear reactors getting bailed out, even impediments being put on renewables in some states like Ohio. Really, if we're going to solve the climate crisis, we also have to solve political crisis, which is to have politics separated from the corporate interests of these industries. And I think there's a piece of this, which is also really important to not been talked about much today, but it's the idea of a just transition. The U.S. has been really bad historically and managing economic transitions in ways that don't leave working people and ordinary people behind, and especially indigenous people and people of color. And so there's this real reticence within the country about undertaking that kind of an economic transition. And we need to raise the safety net for this whole country around the economic transition to be able to make it possible for communities and ordinary people to really see that a positive change is possible. And that's really, I think, the job of Congress and the Biden administration, which is to create a new economic safety net that rationalizes the economic transition that's necessary in the energy sector, especially in order to address the climate crisis. Thanks, Leona.  So we have a little bit of flexibility to hear from everybody on this last question. But Leona, I'll turn it over to you for your thoughts about maybe what you're looking for on the horizon. Thank you. Well, for example, I use the uranium mining industry as kind of a, I guess, a parable. I don't know, an example of what the United States has already done in terms of waste from uranium mines. They have not taken responsibility and they're trying to get some money from companies to deal with the problem. But when we take that same example of what the United States has done in terms of uranium mining, my concern, personally, I have tons of concerns when it comes to safety and destruction of sacred places is one thing because of the national transport. The United States right now doesn't have a place to put the waste. And so we need meaningful discussion with communities that will be affected by all of this. The people at reactors where the waste is now currently and then of course here in New Mexico. And so we really need the United States to address this problem in a way that takes into account EJ principles, sovereignty of indigenous nations and to make sure that the United States is prepared for this type of operation in New Mexico. We're not prepared with any training for hazmat, the railroads, the integrity of the rails is in question. I don't think, I'm talking about New Mexico specifically because we're one of the states that is, our last in every quality of life and we are kind of a poor state and we don't have the political power. We have five people in Congress. I mean, compared to California and New York, we don't have the political power but look at the entire nation as a whole. Our community is ready. Are the agencies ready to deal with accidents? And I don't think the liability issue has also been discussed. Are the companies able to pay for accidents? And will that cost come to us as taxpayers? Most likely, as we've seen with the uranium mining situation, it just hasn't been dealt with. The United States needs to clean up the mess that it's already made and deal with the waste in a holistic way that includes community people at the decision-making table and to consider what's gonna happen in the future and to correct all of this through policy. And so we'd really like to see changes to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and then also to have all of these stakeholders at the table because New Mexico does not consent. This is a big thing that people think we want this waste, we don't want it. And so we do not consent and this is definitely a form of environmental racism. And like I said in my presentation, nuclear colonialism. Well, quite simply, I think that I'm looking forward to democratization of energy and accountability for the real costs. And so those are the two principal areas that we're focusing on. Ben? Just briefly, yeah, I'm looking forward to December 2022 when Germany shut the closets last reactors and then I hope to see the commissioning gaining momentum for its swing, getting momentum into the storage process, finding a final storage. So this is what I'm looking forward to. And Emery? Germany, one of the world's biggest and most capable economies, was 52% renewably powered last year. I was just looking at the data came in from the International Energy Agency a few days ago. In half the weeks last year, the country was over half powered by variable renewables, solar and wind. And in the other half of the weeks, all but just a few weeks, it was in the 80 to nearly 100% range. The lights stayed on. Germany has terrific power system engineers, so does America. I think we will get there faster if we can desubsidize the entire energy system. And I hope I live to see the day when all energy options get to compete fairly at honest prices, regardless of their type, technology, size, location or ownership. That's pretty much the opposite of the system we have now. And that has led to many of the social and environmental problems we've been discussing here. Finally, I would just remind you that a decade ago, the 60 colleagues and I with a great deal of help from industry published a business book called Reinventing Fire, introduced by the then chairman of Exelon and the then president of Shell Oil. And it showed how by 2050 at historically reasonable speed, the United States could run a 2.6 fold bigger economy than in 2010 using no oil, no coal, at least a third less natural gas, no nuclear energy and saving $5 trillion, not counting any benefits from climate improvement or health or any other side benefits, but just counting how much cheaper we can get the same or better energy services by buying the cheapest things first, efficiency and renewables. The market has evolved very much as we suggested it could 10 years ago, except the technology has gotten a lot better and cheaper, not only for renewables, but also for efficiency. You may see behind me some of our passive solar banana farm. This is 1983 technology, where near Aspen at 7,100 feet elevation where it used to go to minus 47 Fahrenheit, we've already harvested 77 banana crops with no heating system, and it was cheaper to build that way. You can do the same now in any climate in the world, same or lower construction costs, better comfort, better resilience, security and health, much more pleasant place to live in. And we can even fix up most existing buildings to that standard cost effectively. The savings in transport and industry are equally dramatic. So I think if we kind of ungrip the fist of nuclear energy around national energy policy and actually let competition, ingenuity and innovation go to work, we will find that climate and many other problems can be solved a lot more easily than we thought, not at a cost, but at a profit. Thank you. Thanks. And that's not even to mention the potential for banana bread, banana splits, frozen bananas. I think the list goes on. Smoothies, can't forget, bananas are a great smoothie. Thank you very much for that. I'd love to visit. It looks beautiful out there. Looks like you're in a tropical place. That unfortunately is gonna do it for us today. Thank you so much to Tim and Leona and Paul and Ben and Emery for joining us today. Just wanted to mention that that last question I asked was a bit of an amalgamation of a bunch of questions that have been coming in, asking people, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? What's going to happen next? So thank you all for doing your best with that difficult question. And thanks to everybody who has participated, whether it's on Twitter or via email, asking those questions. So thank you so much for that. Really excellent set of presentations. I think for me, going into today, I was really eagerly, I was really looking forward to this briefing. And I think, I mean, I sort of knew what to expect because we've been talking about this briefing for weeks. But I think it's really important to make the case that we're not just talking about emissions reductions, we're talking about other things as well that are very important that will, if done properly, facilitate more emissions reductions. And it's true, everything involves trade-offs. And we have to take into account the full range of costs and benefits. We'll have nuclear power with us for a while, but that's primarily because of past investments and past policy decisions. But that's gonna change pretty quickly. And that means we're gonna have to allow our thinking to change, allow our thinking to evolve, and make sure that our policy responses are not just framed to do the right thing by our communities and by people who've been disadvantaged by these policies in the past, but that these policy responses are also designed specifically to follow the evidence and get us to where we need to be sooner rather than later with respect to emissions reduction. So thank you very much once again to our panelists. Also like to just take a moment before we close to thank everybody at ESI who helped make today's briefing a reality. Thanks to Dan O'Brien, Sidney O'Shaughnessy, Anna McGinn, Amber Todorov, Omri Laporte, as well as our five fabulous interns, Celine, Hamza, Jocelyn, Kimmy, and Rachel who are scurrying around behind the scenes, moving questions from one Google Doc to another, helping with recording, helping with notes, and speaking of notes, everything will be posted online in short order.  Thank you, Dan O, for that. We're going to, this is a survey. If you have a few moments, please take it. We would love to hear what you thought of today's session. We're always doing our best to improve and take it for me. We actually read every response and we really take the advice to heart. I've been informed via chat that it was Omri that advanced the slides, not Dan O'Brien. So credit where credit's due. But if you have a moment, it would be really, really nice of you to take our survey. Also, we have a few other briefings coming up. We have congressional climate camp number four at the end of April. We're going to be scheduling this episode of our bonus installment of climate camp in May, looking at budget reconciliation and what that can do for us with respect to climate solutions. We're also going to be looking at flood risks and affordable housing coming up in a few weeks. So stay tuned to all of that. And as always, the best way to find out about our events before they're about to happen is by signing up for our newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. In fact, the issue is out today, a little later today. So it's not too late to sign up for that. Thank you very much. Hope everyone has a great rest of your Tuesday and to Tim, Leona, Paul, Ben and Emery. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much for joining us and we will leave it there. Have a great day.