Nuclear is the answer, Greenies (04-29-2025--Hour3)

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to dpeakclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. They're talking about power generation. I'm not an expert in power generation. However, I feel like I know enough to know that we need power that like our entire civilization operates because we have power. If you don't, we're here. If you wanted to get an idea of what life would be like if all of the power got shut off without a moment's notice, read a book called One Second After by our friend doctor Bill Forston. Like that is a it's sort of a gaming out of one town, Black Mountain, North Carolina, of what that town goes through when an AMP goes off over the Eastern Seaboard and all communications, all anything that operates with the chip is fried. Everything that you know is gone. Everything like you're back into like you're finding. You have to like go back and find things of any kind of mechanical purpose, you know, pre nineteen eighties, before chip started getting put in everything. If a chip is required to run it, it's dead. And so power is the life source of the civilization. And when we are you know, self imposing this depowering approach, we are hamstringing ourselves. We're killing ourselves. And for this was the biggest mistake that the lefties made, the Greenies made on the environmentalist movement side of things, where they rejected nuclear while at the same time demanding that CO two levels be sort of our guiding north star for all types of industrial and energy policy, because you cannot say that you want all of this power to be generated with no CO two additional gases released, and then exclude nuclear because all of the processes required to make the quote renewables burn CO two create CO two. You cannot make the solar panels without mining for the materials. And just because you know, you get the rare earth minerals from some impoverished country halfway around the world using slave labor, do you think that they're using, you know, electric vehicles to mine that material of course not. You're using fossil fuels to extract this stuff, and so the net is more CO two because you are requiring more and more solar panels and more and more turbines and stuff like. Do you know how much hydraulic oil is used in the in the windmills? Like to keep them spinning. You gotta lube those things. It's crazy. You got to keep them cool. These are systems, These are mechanical systems. And what do you think they're made out of? How do you think you make the material of the windmill that's steel? Do you think there's no CO two being emitted in steel production? Give me a break. The more you can power with CO two, the more you can reduce, or sorry, the more you can power with nuclear, the more you reduce the CO two. And now you've got this race to get to AI first, because if we don't, China does, and then I suspect we're going to be in a world of hurt because AI is. It's well, it has the ability, just like old tools, to be really beneficial and also very dangerous, and in the hands of a tyrannical communist regime. I can't even imagine what kind of AI, the are going to deploy against not only their own people, but also their adversaries. So let me get to a couple of messages that I had. We were talking in the last hour about the Spanish blackouts, and we were talking about nuclear generation, these small modular reactors that they're trying to you know, to get greenlit and built in America. So this way, like once people see and companies see this technology being utilized, the way it works, how it's safe, then this is called a like the preference cascade, right where you have the early adopters. Well, you have the pioneers. First, they go in and they you know, they blaze the trail. They're the first ones in. Then you get the early adopters who see where things are going and they can sort of what they say, you know, see around corners. These these pioneers like, oh, I see where this is going. They then become the early adopters, and then it becomes acceptance. And once that happens, then you get this cascading effect where it just builds and bids and goes faster and faster more and more. That's where we have to get to, and I think we have to get there faster than twenty thirty on an optimistic timeline. I got a message here. Don't use my name, please, okay. I am a financial person. I have been watching SMRs, the reactors and other green energy as investment. Yes, Tesla two three Mile Island is now with Terra Power. Bill Gates Tara says they will not plan to share their energy. They need it all. China is leading with thorium, which we abandoned in the forties. They are said to be the most advanced. Now big tech will put a herding on Duke Energy and others if they don't beat them. Permitting is the problem. For reference. Look at the lithium deal in Cheryville area. The whole not in my backyard. There's a guy on YouTube that explains nukes very well. I can send you his name. Google just pulled out of Cat County. I don't know where cat not Chatham, Cat County. Was it power or water? SMRs could help with water too. Permitting dams are as hard to get approvals. I hope this will change with Trump's openness. We also need refineries anyway, I enjoy the show. I did a year in Weaverville and listened to you when you were up there. Oh thanks, okay, when I was working up in Nashville in western North Carolina. Yeah, so the permitting, I have no doubt that is correct. It's the permit approval process that allows opponents to block and delay every project until it's dead, right. That's like, if you're going into a permitting process and the if the goal of the permitting process is designed to thwart projects from being built, right, then you will have a system that looks like ours. If you have a permitting process that is built to award the permits to fast track to help build new power generation sources, then I think the regulatory regime looks different than what we have. Scott wants to know, why does it have to be a metric poop ton of energy? Why can't it be an imperial poop ton of energy? Now that's a fair point. I don't know why it's imperial metric is better. Look, I'm sorry. I know, I'm American. I'm supposed to, you know, reject the metric system in favor of the imperial system. But I don't. I feel like we should have gone. I feel like if we had just gone to the metric system before I was born, this would have been much easier for me personally, you know. But like the metric system just makes more sense. It really does. Now, I'm not saying that for the temperature stuff, stay with the fahrenheit. You can use celsius for the experiments and all that stuff, but fahrenheit works way better just to know like how hot is it, how warm is it outside? Because celsius is not. It's not precise enough for me, you know, because the difference between seventy and seventy five that's pretty big. That's you know, whether I'm wearing you know, cargo shorts. I'm just kidding. I wouldn't wear cargo shorts, but like shorts or pants, like that's a huge difference. So I need to know that that I would not go celsius. But I do feel like metric it makes more sense, you know, Like how many yards are in a mile? Do you know that? Do you know how many yards are in People don't even know feet in a mile. I don't even remember how many feet are in a mile. It's like five thousand something, right, Yeah, So like these are like why why? Luckily for me, I do have a size twelve foot so I'm able to navigate the world pretty well just by you know, measuring stuff with my feet. But not everybody's got a twelve inch foot, So why they called inches? And then you break them down into these weird fractions of inches that are difficult to to do the math on. You know, Oh, I have a seven eighths and I got to add it to a one in three quarters like ah, and that's an easy one. So metric is it's a superior system. I'm sorry, That's why I go metric poop load all right? So spring is here a time of renewal and celebrations. You've got graduations, weddings, anniversaries and the special days for mom and dad. Your family's making memories that are going to last a lifetime. But let me ask you, are all of the those treasured moments from days gone by? Are they hidden away on old VCR tapes, eight millimeter films, photos slides? Are they preserved? Because over time, these precious memories can fade and deteriorate, losing the magic of yesterday. At Creative Video, they help you protect what matters most. Their expert team digitizes your cherished family moments and transfers them onto a USB drive, freezing them in time so they can be enjoyed for generations to come. I urge you do not wait until it's too late this spring, celebrate your past. Visit Creative Video today and let them preserve your legacy with the love and care that it deserves. Creative Video Preserving family Memories since nineteen ninety seven. Located in mint Hill, just off four eighty five. Mail orders are accepted to get all the details at create a Video dot com. John says in an email to Pete at vpteklenarshow dot com. Any nuclear facilities built by Trump or the administration, and we'll need some serious security. Those tesla loving liberals would have a field day keying the reactors. That is a security Uh yeah, that is a consideration. We're going to have to maybe some fencing and cameras. This story from the AP earlier this year, Big tech wants to plug data centers right into power plants. Big tech wants to bypass all of the transmission lines everything else. They want to direct feed right to the power plant. The utility companies are pushing back, saying that's not fair, not fair, looking for a quick fix for their fast growing electricity diets. Tech giants are increasingly looking to strike deals with power plant owners to plug in directly, avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves the little people. It's raising questions over whether diverting power to higher paying customers will leave enough for others, and whether it's fair to excuse big power users from paying for the grid. Federal regulators are trying to figure out what to do about it, and quickly. So this is interesting because I told I've said this before. I put solar panels on the house. I did it for prepper purposes. I want to be able to generate some electricity during daylight hours if you know, everything goes to pot so that was why I did it. Now, obviously in an EMP would fry my system also, and I'm not permitted by my HOA to put a Faraday cage over my entire house, so I do recognize the limitations here, however, like I don't use as much power. My power bill is like eleven dollars a month, and I sell back or I push back energy into the Duke system. They haven't paid me for that, actually, so they're supposed to. There was like a lottery system and you could get paid back. Like I should be able to pay back to sell my energy that I'm sending back down the line. I should be able to do that. If they're going to use the power that I'm generating that I'm not using during the daylight hours then and it's going to go back down the line for other people to use that they are that Duke is now selling to other customers. I should be able to get some money back for that. That being said, I do recognize that I am using their transmission lines, and so this is part of the that's part of the deal. Like I'm plugged into your grid, and when you know it's nighttime and I'm using power, I'm drawing off that grid. So I have to pay to utilize the grid. I get that. I think that's completely fair for these big tech companies they want to plug directly into the power system or into the power plant, they want to have their own dedicated line or something. I don't think they should have to pay for the grid. If they're not on the grid, then they should just be charged a different rate to pay for the generation of the power. Right to pay for maintenance costs and all of that they should pay for their power in a separate thing. That's fine if the plant can make enough power. See here's the key. If you're going to allow big tech to bypass the grid plug directly into the power generators, and now you're going to be causing brownouts for all the rest of us while you get a constant supply of power. Okay, now that's not fair either. Front End Center, according to the AP, is a data center that Amazon's cloud computing subsidiary called Amazon Web Services, is building next to the Susquehanna Nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania. The arrangement between the plant's owners and AWS Amazon Web Services called a behind the meter connection. It is the first such deal to come before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Up until now, the FERK has rejected a deal that would send nine hundred and sixty megawatts to the data center. Nine hundred and sixty megawats, by the way, is forty percent of the plant's capacity. That's enough to power half a million homes or more. That leaves the deal and others that likely would follow in limbo. It's not clear when FURK, which blocked the deal on procedural grounds would take up the matter again. Maybe they have by now the companies that they're very frustrated because they're delayed, like five years in the queue. And I get that. The rapid growth of cloud computing and artificial intelligence as fueled demand for data centers that need power to run servers, storage systems, networking equipment, and cooling systems. That has spurred proposals to bring nuclear power plants out of retirement, develop small modular reactors the SMRs we talked about last hour, and build utility scale renewable installations or new natural gas plants. Back in December, California based Aklow announced an agreement to provide twelve gigawatts to data center developer Switch from small nuclear reactors powered by nuclear waste. This is where I read it last Hour. I was talking to a caller named Matt. We said, one of the challenges is what do you do at the nuclear waste. Apparently this company Acklow may have figured out a way to generate power from the nuclear waste. That would be fantastic. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina? Just a quick drive up the mountain, and Cabins of Ashville is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get family and friends together for a big old reunion. Cabins of Ashville has the ideal spot for you where you can reconnect with your loved ones and the things that truly matter. Nestled within the breath taking fourteen thousand acres of the Pisga National Forest, their cabins offer a serene escape in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Centrally located between Ashville and the entrance of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. It's the perfect balance of seclusion and proximity to all the local attractions with hot tubs, fireplaces, air conditioning, smart TVs, Wi Fi, grills, outdoor tables and your own private covered porch. Choose from thirteen cabins, six cottages, two villas, and a great lodge with eleven king sized bedrooms. Cabins of Ashville has the ideal spot for you for any occasion, and they have pet friendly accommodations. Call or text eight two, eight, three, six seven, seventy sixty eight, or check out all there is to offer at cabins Offashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. David, Welcome to the program. Hello David, David yo oh hello, hello, hello, oh hello, Sorry, No, it's okay, let's gone on. I just want to make a comment about the sharing of the power beginning at the point of distribution. Yeah, it seems to me that the people who are paying for the power and the distribution and the tax on top of it, ought to get the first, the first of the distribution, that the remaining that doesn't meet the peak level necessary to support the area, the remaining leftovers can go to those who want those. But to get in front of us and take the prime stuff. It's like saying, here, you get the best wine, I get the lousy wine. I don't think that works well. So well, it's not a matter of the quality of the power, right, and but it isn't right, And they would be well, they would be and they would be paying I would imagine, right, they would be paying for you know, the full cost of the power generation, whatever infrastructure they have to build in order to get the direct line they want to what they don't want to do is to tap into the existing infrastructure grid. They want a direct feed, but to the point then that they would be sort of jumping the line and consuming forty percent of you know, a power plant's production, right. I think that's the problem. It creates this scarcity among all of the consumers that don't have the ability to build their own energy infrastructure. And it's also as true that when a lot of people are trying to get the same power output, the cost for kill a lot hour goes up. The cost we say that again, the more people the cost goes up. Well, what happens what I think happens, and that could be wrong about this. I think what goes on is when you have a high demand at a low availability to kill a lot hour, costs goes up. Yeah, if you've got like peak usage times of you know, like in the mornings, everybody's taking showers and you know, all the AC is running and all of that stuff. Same thing with like water. Yeah, so yeah, during peak demand times then some yeah, sometimes you can have like peak pricing and that sort of thing, and then they are like, oh, please conserve energy and all of that. So yeah, if they're doing those types of energy reduction programs against you know, residential users. Would they also demand that the you know, the these big tech companies would have to reduce their usage too. Yeah. It raises a lot of It raises a lot of questions as to, you know, will they play favorites for the bigger customers. You know, money talks type thing. Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, sos. The capacity is the capacity is in a given amount. So as soon as we start using the capacity at a higher level than we can produce it, the cost of it goes up. Yeah, now I understand. So I think the answer is that these big tech companies need to build their own power generation systems if they don't want to be on the grid, and that means they need to do more of the SMRs one. Yeah, all right, David, I appreciate the call, sir. You're welcome, all right, take care of you. Yeah, the SMRs are small modular reactors, these nuclear reactors, they build them themselves. You want this kind of power, this amount of power. Big tech also wants to stand up their centers quickly. But tech's appetite for energy comes at a time when the power supply is already strained by efforts to shift away from planet warming fossil fuels. This is according to Mark Levy at the AP. So what is he admitting there? That we're moving away from power generation that can actually satisfy demand, but we're moving away from it for purely policy reasons. In theory, the Amazon Center in Pennsylvania would let Susquehanna sell power for more than they get by selling it into the grid. The profit potential is one that other nuclear plant operators in particular are embracing after years of financial distress and frustration with how they are paid in the broader electricity markets. Many say they have been forced to compete in some markets against a flood of cheap natural gas, as well as state subsidized solar and wind energy. Power Plant owners also say the arrangement benefits the wider public by bypas asking the costly build out of long power lines and leaving more transmission capacity on the grid for everybody else. The worry energy prices would increase significantly, and there's no explanation for how rising demand for power will be met, even before big power plants drop out of the supply mix. Separately, to electric utility owners, which make money in deregulated states from building out the grid and delivering power have protested that the Susquehanna AWS arrangement amounts to free loading off a grid that ordinary customers paid to build and maintain. Chicago based Exelon and Columbus Sorry, that's one company. Chicago based Excelon and Columbus and Ohio based American Electric Power say that this Amazon deal would allow Amazon to avoid one hundred and forty million dollars a year that it would otherwise owe. Susquehanna's owners say the data center won't be on the grid, and then question why it should have to pay to maintain the grid if they're not on it. But critics say that the power plant itself is benefiting from taxpayer subsidies and ratepayer subsidies subsidized services and should not be able to strike deals with private customers that could increase costs for others. Either way, this government decision could have massive repercussions for the entire country because it will set a precedent for how the FERK, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, as well as grid operators are going to handle an avalanche of similar requests that are waiting in the wings from data center companies and nuclear power plants. John Locke Foundation how to write up about this. They've got a new report looking at two differ diferent paths to carbon neutrality. This is a big thing, you know. We want to be carbon neutral by twenty fifty in North Carolina. We can use renewables or nuclear, and the report took a look at both. Nuclear is not only a zero emission resource capable of base load power generation, but it's also the best option for meeting future increases in energy demand. Nuclear would be the more cost effective solution. All right, If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too, And you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why. Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place, so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground news a few months ago and more recently, chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check dot Ground, dot News slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. So John Locke Foundation put out a recent report on oh as a comparison on renewables versus nuclear, the two different paths to get to carbon neutrality in electricity by twenty fifty. That's the state's carbon plan or non carbon plan, I guess. So they looked at it and they determined nuclear is the more cost effective solution to meet the required power generation capacity for twenty fifty projected. Obviously, the renewable scenario requires approximately twelve thousand, five hundred miles of transmission infrastructure twelve five hundred miles, and it requires almost eight million acres of North Carolina land for power generation. That is about twenty percent of our land miss for the Yeah for wind and solar, So yeah, twenty percent of the entire state's land would have to be covered in solar panels and windmills. In comparison, the newnuclear scenario requires about ninety percent less in the miles of transmission, so twelve five hundred for renewables, thirteen hundred for nuclear, a tenth of the transmission lines required. Also, rather than seven point seven million acres of land, nuclear would need just fifteen thousand acres. So not only would the nuclear scenario require significantly less new capacity and infrastructure, it would also be more reliable. It would be more efficient and more cost effective. You can read the whole report at the John Locke Foundation. The Hellion says, this show has such a great comedic pool. Thank you. I appreciate it, although I don't even try to be funny. That's one of those it's a gift. We were talking earlier about the Spanish blackouts. They still don't know what caused the massive blackout across like the entire country and into Portugal and France, and their explanations were like indecipherable. Russ said that a few years ago I was with a group of people in the neighborhood level nuclear plants came up and oh, hang on a second, he has two messages. Here's the uh all right. So the first one was that on the nuclear front, he says, a college age girl suggested that we should just make everything rechargeable like phones. That way, you could just plug into the wall of your into the wall or your car, and then you wouldn't have to worry about electricity. Yeah, oh child. And then he says the very verbose scientific explanation for the Spanish power outage reminds me have a saying that if you cannot explain something without using jargon or technical terms, you either don't really understand it or you're trying to hide something. Joseph says, so is the Iberian blackout another test run? After surviving Helene and seeing how critical Mark Starling was, Mark is the morning guy up at my old alma mater up in Ashville on the Morning Show. Yeah, I mean they stayed on the air solid for like three weeks straight. Was the question, Can other places do that too? You mean, can other radio stations do that? Sure? I'm pretty confident we could. We've got way more people than the station Mark's at Mark had like him and his producer. Those are the only employees left after the the blood letting that claimed my tenure. So yeah, I have no doubt we here with a live local lineup from five am all the way through eight pm. I'm pretty sure we'd be able to staff it. And we got massive generators that do not run on solar panels. And John says, why can't we build faster? Answer local state and federal regulations. That is true. Let me get Joan on real quick here. Hello Joan, Yes, sir, I have a very simple question, okay, if China's building all these cold plants, yeah, and cold is so bad for the environment and so babil, why anti Chinese people dying? Wise, if cold is the natural fossil fuel, and the United States they'll burn coal forever in a day until people came up with all these cot missions and things. But I'd just like to know why anti Chinese people dying at at a high rate because of cold plants. So well, I mean a couple of reasons I could cite here is first off, you would be relying on communists to give you accurate data, but you're not chilling. That's that right, that's one possibility. A cheret got you. No, it's not an eighth. Wait wait, Joan hang on, I detect I detected dismissiveness in your joke. It's not an ancient Chinese you know, you know, I know it's not ancient Chinese. Joan joon joone, stop stop Joan stop. For the love of God, jon't okay okay. So to a listener, Joan, when you're huffing and puffing and laughing through the phone that you can't hear anything except just noise, it's not an ancient Chinese secret. It is a modern communist cover up. The Communist Party controls the Chinese government. So number one, and that indicated that I would give you other numbers for potential explanations for why Chinese people aren't dying in the streets so dropping dead like you said, which I think is a bit hyperbolic, because I think it probably takes a long time for like the lung disease and all of that stuff to manifest. But the number one is that you're trusting the Chinese communists to tell you. Number two is that the wind blows the pollutants, right, So stuff in Tennessee blows over here. That's always been a big problem. Their pollution will blow across our state and so over in China. I suspect a lot of that will blow off out into the ocean. It'll make its way someplace. I don't know. Number three on the pollution front, have you seen pictures of China's air quality, because I have. You have cities that are perpetually covered in smog. You can't see the sun. Now, if you think that's a healthy way to live, I encourage you to go live in the communist country of China. Now, I don't know what the purpose of the call was. I don't because she has now dropped off because I put her on hold. I was going to bring her back, but I wanted to outline those three things, and I couldn't get the word in edgewise because I don't know what she was doing there. But anyway, the if the argument is that we should be building more coal fired plants, that is a perfectly fine argument to make. It relies on you denying any kind of negative consequence, you know, for emissions and that sort of thing, and you could have that argument. I prefer to advocate for nuclear because it's a cleaner argument and tech it's it doesn't emit any emissions. And so if you're going up against people who are arguing that CO two is killing everybody and it's an existential threat, why not take that argument off the table and win the argument. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you're heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.