"The Case for Nuclear Power" with Aidan Morrison
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2025
⏱️ 98 minutes
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Summary
Have rich democracies been hoodwinked into chasing a mirage of green energy? Are renewables leading us into a dead-end of brown-outs, white-elephant wind farms, and costly, dodgy electricity? Are the "smart homes" and "smart grids" actually overly-complicated patchwork solutions to a problem that has a safe, affordable, reliable, carbon-free solution - nuclear? And what the hell is "baseload" power, anyway?
Aidan Morrison is the Director of Energy Research at the classical-liberal Centre for Independent Studies. He's a data scientist with postgrad qualifications in physics who leads the centre's energy systems research. He argues that most assessments of renewable energy are incomplete or misleading.
If you missed Josh's chat with the renewable-energy engineer and entrepreneur Saul Griffith on June 10th, you might want to give it a listen first here. Here, Aidan and Josh debate how to think about generating and supplying cheap power to a high-tech society... and whether the answer to our growing energy needs is staring us right in the face.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gahy humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous idea for you. |
| 0:09.0 | The entire renewable energy green revolution is a costly dead end that will lead us into nothing but brownouts, blackouts and an overly expensive climate chaotic future. |
| 0:22.3 | Here's another alternative, dangerous idea for you, perhaps the opposite idea, but |
| 0:26.6 | equally dangerous, depending on your inclination, that in a generation's time we will be |
| 0:31.7 | living in a world festooned by nuclear power plants. That will be our main source of |
| 0:37.4 | baselo load energy. |
| 0:39.3 | Nuclear power is a debate that's coming up more and more in Western democracies as we |
| 0:44.8 | struggle to figure out what to do about climate chaos and the limitations of renewable |
| 0:48.8 | energy. I've spoken a couple of times on this show to opponents of nuclear power. |
| 0:54.1 | I spoke to the Nobel |
| 0:55.5 | Peace Prize winner, Dave Sweeney, who's campaigned his whole life against not just nuclear weapons, |
| 1:00.5 | but also nuclear energy. And I spoke to Saul Griffith, who is a renewable energy entrepreneur |
| 1:06.1 | and engineer. If you haven't listened to that episode, in fact, he's been on this show twice, |
| 1:11.5 | you may want to go back and listen to that because we talk quite a lot about Saul. We talk a lot |
| 1:17.2 | about his worldview as it sort of is representative of the overall worldview of people who |
| 1:22.6 | believe that renewable energy is the solution to the planet's crisis. That episode was on the 10th of June |
| 1:32.0 | with Saul Griffith, if you want to listen to it, because today we articulate a different vision |
| 1:36.7 | of an electricity future for Australia and the globe. Despite the fact that at the last federal |
| 1:42.7 | election in Australia, the opposition conservative |
| 1:45.2 | liberal party took to the people, a platform to build nuclear power plants in Australia and |
| 1:50.7 | go nuclear, ended up losing, not just because of that, but it certainly didn't help. |
| 1:55.6 | Nonetheless, the director of energy research at the Centre for Independent Studies, who is today's |
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