Victor Reis

Zierler:

OK. This is—

Reis:

Hey, this might be something you folks think about in terms of oral history, but the title of my book, which I'm sure I've mentioned, is Eisenhower, Feynman, and the Four Prunes: Systems Analysis and Strategy Among the Dangerous Science and Technology Elite. And I got that from Eisenhower's farewell speech and Feynman's commencement speech. And so in the book, I talk about Eisenhower, the fact that he started all these organizations that I had been to. I talk about Feynman, who was really concerned with scientific integrity and how you have to deal with policymakers. And then I give a discussion, "What do you mean by strategy and systems analysis?" and how I've done that throughout my career. And how do I deal with this last part of the title, which is Among the Science and Technology Elite? I just put it in there. Now I want to analyze it, right?

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

So my first try was, well, let me look in the index where my name shows up on various books, and then list all the other people I know in all these indexes. I've done that. And I'm looking at that and, yeah, little bit self-centered. I mean, why would anybody be interested in that? So then, the other night, there was a program on, it was a program by Niall Ferguson on PBS on networking. I don't know if you—NetWorld. I don't know if you saw that or not?

Zierler:

No.

Reis:

And he talks about how we're connected in networks all different ways. And he reminded me of this whole idea of the seven degrees of separation. Are you familiar with that?

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

And there's seven degrees of—what was his name? You know, the actor, how they're all connected to him and—

Zierler:

Right, right.

Reis:

—seven degrees of Erdős. So I said, well, why don't I go back and take a look at Eisenhower and Feynman? And even though I didn't know them, I'm sure I'm—let me take a look at the people to whom I'm only two degrees of separation.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

So I did four or five with Eisenhower. And then, with Feynman, I says, oh, let me see if I can look with Feynman—you know Feynman, right?

Zierler:

Of course, of course.

Reis:

And let me take a look at the people—let me go throughout his career and take a look and see where I'm two degrees of separation from these people, from Feynman, and though what it meant in terms of my career.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

And this turned out to be very interesting. And I'll go through that very quickly with you, but I was just wondering if that's something that the American Institute of Physics—after all, you've got all this information. How do they connect up together at some stage? It might be very interesting, if you haven't already done it.

Zierler:

Well, I'll tell you, Vic, it's interesting that you talk about Feynman, because rarely an interview goes by that I do that somebody doesn’t have a Feynman story or a Feynman observation or something like that. I mean—

Reis:

Oh, yeah.

Zierler:

—it is just remarkable, head and shoulders above anybody else.

Reis:

Right.

Zierler:

Not just in terms of greatness, but just in terms of references, the way that he looms so large in everyone's mind.

Reis:

Yeah.

Zierler:

It's really him and everybody else. It is a remarkable thing.

Reis:

Right. And so, again, I just started that with his name in that because of his "Cargo Cult" speech. It was so good, so I thought it—where he was saying, hey, don't trust—you have to have scientific integrity. And then you run into these moments in your career where you've got to say, "Wait a minute, what would Feynman do?" or something like that. So let me just tell you what they are, and I'm not a physicist, right?

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

To start out with, he was a graduate student at Princeton with John Tukey, right?

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

And the director of central intelligence, who was the head of the CIA at the time, he has a science and advisory committee, and I was on that the same time with John Tukey.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

OK. And then I go to—'cause Feynman knew a lot of people at Los Alamos. That's where he went from graduate school, to Los Alamos. Well, there's a lot, but there's Edward Teller, right? As you know, he rifled Teller's desk as a prank. But then, Teller is sort of integral in my story because I first started working him when I was at Lincoln Lab and he ends up throughout the DOE and when I was in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. And mostly we were sort of at odds. He's a perfect example of what Eisenhower complained about.

Zierler:

Now, where does Richard Garwin fit in with this? Do you have a connection with him?

Reis:

Well, I was almost going to put him, 'cause he was there, too.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

And I was almost going to put in Richard, as well, because I got to know him when I was in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and we've stayed in contact. He writes these rather turgid books, which has a lot of good stuff into it.

Zierler:

[laugh] Right.

Reis:

And I always think about Richard. He's one of the few guys I can't make laugh.

Zierler:

That's right. [laugh] I interviewed Richard last week and it was—

Reis:

Ah.

Zierler:

—one of the most somber and serious three hours of my life. Not good or bad, just—

Reis:

Absolutely, absolutely.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

I could've put him in, but I don't have any stories that connect what Feynman did—like with Teller, I mean, he was a big part of my story. So then that takes Feynman—and then I got with Freeman Dyson, Feynman went to Cornell. And then Dyson and he collaborate, and they have written about each other and so forth and so on. And I've known Freeman for quite some time. First I knew him in the JASONs. But one day I was going down to—might've still been at DOE or almost left, and Will Happer—do you know Will Happer?

Zierler:

Yeah. Yep.

Reis:

Yeah. He invites me down to Princeton to give a talk, you know, give a seminar in the Physics department. And then, after it, he says, "I've invited Freeman Dyson over." Great! Your chance to talk to Freeman Dyson. And he wanted me to talk to Dyson. Happer was just starting seriously about being a climate change denier, and he wanted me to meet this great man and talk to Freeman, who was very easy to talk to.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

I don't know if you've interviewed him or not?

Zierler:

No, unfortunately.

Reis:

Well, he's dead, but… And it was a very pleasant talk, but, of course, the idea was to convince me—I was at DOE at the time—that climate was not very serious. I mean, I hadn't really super looked at it at the time.

Zierler:

Yeah. But no one really had at that point, right? I mean, Roger Revelle—

Reis:

Well—

Zierler:

—and Al Gore—

Reis:

—yes. It certainly hadn't reached the stage—this was, like, 2000 or something like that.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

And I asked Will, "Why does he think all these other scientists believe that there's climate change and he doesn't?"

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

"Why are they doing that?" And he says, "They're in it for the money."

Zierler:

Right, right.

Reis:

But, oops, that's the Feynman problem, right?

Zierler:

Yeah. Yep.

Reis:

OK. So there's that. Now, the next person I run into with Feynman is Harold Brown.

Zierler:

Uh-huh.

Reis:

Now, I can't exactly put the two together —I can't in reference, but Harold Brown was the president of Caltech—

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

—overlapping Feynman quite a bit, so I can't believe they didn't meet each other.

Zierler:

Of course.

Reis:

So I'm one handshake away from that. And I worked a lot with Harold when I was at SAIC, science applications, they had a technical advisory panel which Harold was the chairman and I was the executive secretary.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

And so we had to put something together every quarter, and it was a very good advisory panel. Bill Perry was on it, Bobby Inman, Gene Fubini. So I got to know these guys very well. I got to work with Harold, and we stayed friends. And, in fact, Harold was on the IBM Board of Directors when I found myself having to do—when Stockpile Stewardship and build parallel processing. I talked to Harold, I said, "How do I get IBM into this?" And he was helpful in my being able to do that. But, again, we stayed friends. The next thing with Feynman is Danny Hillis at Thinking Machines. Now, I was sort of vaguely aware of this, but at the time—are you familiar with Thinking Machines?

Zierler:

Sure, sure.

Reis:

That's the first, right?

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

Feynman was really almost one of the technical founders of Thinking Machines. Well, Thinking Machines was one of the main things I supported when I was the head of DARPA and got to know Danny fairly well. So now we're tracking Feynman's career, and the last thing I can think about right now is Feynman being on the Rogers Commission with the O-rings, and he was the one who did that. Well, if you dig around a little bit, you find out that the reason Feynman did this is he was pointed out to the o-rings by a Don Kutyna, who was an air force general. Are you familiar with that story?

Zierler:

No.

Reis:

No. Well, Kutyna's on the commission, as well, and he invites Feynman over to his house. I got this looking at YouTube, about Feynman, right? And Feynman's complaining a little bit about this. He said, "I was famous for that O-ring stuff but," he said, "actually I was used by this guy Kutyna." And Kutyna says why don't they have dinner, so he says, "Let's go look at my car." And he takes him outside in the garage. They're playing around. He says, "My O-rings get stiff," or something. And then Feynman connects the O rings to the Challenger O-rings, right? 'Cause he immediately—thinking about all this Challenger stuff, right? So Kutyna tipped him off. And I worked with Kutyna very closely when I was doing the space policy 'cause Kutyna was in charge of the air force launch vehicles at the time.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

Sort of conspired to keep the expendable launch vehicles in the fleet at the same time everybody was doing the shuttle, because the push on the shuttle was really that everybody goes on the shuttle.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

That's the only way we can keep the cost down is that everybody just ride on the shuttle. Well, that became the policy, but we worked sort of behind the lines, the scenes, and it's all that sort of bureaucratic deep-state stuff.

Zierler:

Yeah. [laugh]

Reis:

That was Kutyna. And, of course, Kutyna, in turn, had been tipped off by this O-ring stuff by Sally Ride.

Zierler:

Uh-huh.

Reis:

And I had gotten to know Sally Ride because, again, I went down to Houston. So there's sort of second order of separation from Feynman, and I've sort of done it in his career all the way from the time he was—and connect it with various things in my career.

Zierler:

So I wonder, also—I connected with you through Tom Rosenbaum—

Reis:

Right.

Zierler:

—so I wonder what the connection might be there with Caltech and Feynman?

Reis:

Well, it was not—because, now, I got to know Tom. He was the vice president of laboratories for the University of Chicago. OK. And they ran Argonne Nation Laboratory. And after I left the DOE—I'm trying to think—so I was on their board of governors. OK. And he was one of the main interfaces, 'cause he was the vice president for laboratories at University of Chicago. They were under his purview, so we got to work together —it was a very good thing. And then he moved to Caltech.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

And then the Caltech people invited me to go to give a talk, and I dropped in to see him and we chatted some, and then we also talked about, while I'm writing this book, about staying in contact. 'Cause the other thing with the book is, gee, how does the government buy science and technology? So, other than that Argonne, we've never really been professionally connected, other than in the very informal. But it was actually a very good advisory group at the time. Hermann Grunder was the head of Argonne National Laboratory. They had a very, very good light source, you know, these light sources, x-ray sources?

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

That had a lot of different people coming in. They were just getting out of the nuclear power business, so there was a lot of action. So they lost Argonne West. I mean, there's a lot of things that were happening, interfacing with the government and the science community at Argonne at the time.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

So that's how it got—you can ask questions, or I can leap into climate change.

Zierler:

Yeah. No, that's good. Let's go right into climate change. And, in fact, for the interview, I didn't really do my formal beginning thing—

Reis:

All right.

Zierler:

—so let me do that now and then we'll get that at the beginning of the transcript. So this is David Zierler, oral historian for the American Institute of Physics. It is April 22nd, 2020. It's my pleasure to be here with Vic Reis for part 2 of our discussion, which is going to focus on his work on climate change. So, Vic, thank you very much for being with me again. And let me ask—the first question is when did climate change—so it's two questions: When did the notion of a warming planet first enter your mindset, and when did you start to think about this as an issue worth considering in an in-depth manner?

Reis:

Yeah. Let me back up just a bit. And I think we covered this somewhat last time, the whole Stockpile Stewardship.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

And that was being started from—the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, Stockpile Stewardship, how do you maintain the stockpile without testing, right?

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

And under a comprehensive test-ban treaty—I think we discussed that.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

That was with the laboratories. And that all worked fine, or it generally worked fine, in fact, it's still working. But then I had this problem with Secretary Richardson. It was first the "Chinese spy." I'm putting quotes on it.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

—was he a spy, wasn't he a spy? Notra Trulock, who was head of DOE counterintelligence —there was a whole big mess. I went to Secretary Richardson and said, "Hey, you gotta do something.” I could wrap the president's involvement, the whole president's impeachment—it was just sort of a nutty time.

Zierler:

And, Vic, what year are we talking about here?

Reis:

It was 1999.

Zierler:

OK.

Reis:

All right. This was 1999, and so, as a result of that, however a lot of this is in the newspapers, I ended up getting fired. OK. Again, this is in books and things like that. Most of it is pretty accurate. But then I said, well, look, one of the things that I learned while I'm doing this Stockpile Stewardship was, gee, from a proliferation perspective how easy—and this is one of the nuclear problems—how easy is it to make a nuclear weapon.

Zierler:

Yeah. Yep.

Reis:

The whole terrorist issue, how easy it is to make a nuclear weapon. And, as you might expect, a lot of this is very classified, but—

Zierler:

Of course, right.

Reis:

—still, John McPhee wrote a book about nuclear terrorism—there's enough out there, to say this is not impossible at all if you have the material. And, by the way, even if you're not worried about safety and environmental stuff or whatever, you've got to worry about it. And that was an important subject. Remember, this was just around—especially, then, after 911 this became important. And you began to look at that. That's something I'm really interested in doing since I learned about it from the nuclear weapons perspective. What about from the other perspective? And then, people who are in the nuclear power business said, no, no, no, we don't have to worry about that.

Zierler:

Yep, yep.

Reis:

So I says, well, that's something—let me get involved in it. And when I was at SAIC, I was able to basically get started looking at it from a terrorism perspective. But then, you ask, well, what do I need nuclear power at all for?

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

You know, nuclear power was having problems. We built a lot of it and then Three Mile Island and so forth. And I got involved then—Clay Sell, who was then the deputy secretary of energy, and he had worked with Mac Thornberry and worked with Pete Domenici, who I'd been working very closely with, was interested in nuclear power as well. But when I got out of DOE, I began to think seriously about this nuclear power business, why do we do it, and the real reason that we're doing it—it's not because it's cheap and it's not because it's easy, it's because of climate.

Zierler:

Huh.

Reis:

All right? And so—

Zierler:

You mean, why do we continue to do it?

Reis:

Yeah.

Zierler:

Because, obviously, the Civilian Nuclear Energy long precedes any concern about climate change.

Reis:

Absolutely.

Zierler:

So you're talking about the ongoing effort to maintain civilian nuclear power?

Reis:

Right. By the time I started looking at it in the early 2000s, it was, well, it's there, what do we do with it?

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

You know, do you let it die out or do you let it build up? And so I said, well, one thing, if you're going to have it and it's going to affect… The original reason, if you dig back, is the power companies thought they like to have more than one source of fuel.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

They like to diversify if they can.

Zierler:

Now, when you mean more than one source, do you mean redundancy or really to rely on one and the other?

Reis:

Redundancy

Zierler:

Uh-huh.

Reis:

The price of oil may go up, it may go down. Gas goes with oil. It may go up, it may go down.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

Different sources of supply, et cetera, et cetera. So just as a proven manner they can do that. Now, how they got caught in this, who knows.

Zierler:

And, now, wind and solar is a nonfactor at this point, right? I mean, it's an infinitesimal—

Reis:

It's less than 1%.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

You know, it looks good, but it's less than 1%. So I said, well, let me just look—I think I probably told you [?] before, this is what I do is analysis, right?

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

And I try to—what's really happening here? And so I began to look at nuclear power across the board at that point, even though I had been fired. I said, "I'm interested in where nuclear power is." "so I worked with the labs." Ernie Moniz was the under secretary at the time and he encouraged me.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

We were friends. So he said, "Hey, that's a—yep. Lot of good issues there. Why don't you dig around into it?" Again, when you dig around into it, at the time, there were two—one issue is there is the problem of, spent fuel Yucca Mountain was still going on. Wait a minute, Yucca Mountain, if we ever do it, it'll be all filled up before nuclear expands—what do you do beyond that?

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

And then fast reactors really become important because you can do the recycling. Oops, recycling well, that's how you get plutonium and so forth. So there's a lot of basically good issues there. One, as a matter of good environment—don't throw this stuff away, use it again, right?

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

I mean, just as an environmental—don't throw it away, use it again. Then Clay Sell said to me , "Look, President Bush,” this is now Bush II, who he had worked with, "is really interested in doing something in the nuclear business."

Zierler:

But not because of climate?

Reis:

No, it was not because of climate—

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

—all right? It was because the other countries were doing—it was really a non-proliferation concern

Zierler:

Uh-huh.

Reis:

OK. 'Cause George W. Bush was very uneasy about nuclear weapons. Well, again, if I could go back to the Eisenhower—wait a minute, I want to use the good stuff, not the evil stuff.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

How do I do that? And he just said, "Hey, I'm interested in doing this." Clay knew I had been working in this area.

Zierler:

And who had Bush's ear on this issue?

Reis:

Well, I think—that's a really good question. I don't know. I think, if I listened to Clay—remember, this was just something that he himself said, "I'd like to do something in nuclear."

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

OK. And there's a lot of reasons. I mean, climate was not really one of them, but I think it was other countries were doing—Russia was now back doing a lot of nuclear, France was still doing nuclear, England was doing nuclear, Italy, you name it. Chinese were really doing quite a lot. So it was really a sort of international push on that.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

Clay asked me to come back and help with something, put something together. Clay said, "Look the White House can't—National Security Council, there's nobody there who can do this." And he was now back in DOE and he asked the people there, and he got a laundry list. He didn't have a coherent program.

Zierler:

Uh-huh.

Reis:

So he asked me to come back into the DOE, which I did, first as a government part-time employee. And I said, "Well, I know how to do that." That's what I did in Stockpile Stewardship. You gather a group together who have the right background, you sit in a room, you figure it out, et cetera. But he said, "Look, but you can't tell anybody you're doing this because we don't want it to leak into congress. We want to make sure the president feels comfortable with it before we're doing it first. We want to give him a—"

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

And we were able to do that. It included—'cause you had to have Yucca Mountain, but you also had to have—the key on that was two things: We were going to get into the fast reactor business. We would get into the reprocessing business. But the key on dealing with other countries is this whole idea of fuel leasing take it back.

Zierler:

Now, with Yucca Mountain, were you involved with Harry Reid and his people on this?

Reis:

Well, no, no. I was very, very involved with Harry Reid during my days at Stockpile Stewardship 'cause he was on the committee and they did a lot of testing. And so he was against testing.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

Right. I mean, I'm sorry. He was for testing, against Yucca Mountain.

Zierler:

Right, right.

Reis:

But he was really a solid guy. In fact, what he said, "Look," he said, "Nevada is mining and gambling," and he'd like to get them more involved in technology. 'Cause he said, "That's the future, and we'd like to be able to be basically in that game, as well." So I got to know Harry actually quite well. I called him Harry, he called Mr. Secretary.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Reis:

And I said, "You don't have to call me Mr. Secretary." "No, no." So it's interesting how all that plays out. In any event, I'm putting together this story, right? And, again, I'm not sure I'm answering all the questions—but it was pushing fast reactors, recycling, etc and it became the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership—but because we went around to all of the other countries. Literally, Russia, France, UK, they were all involved with—in other words, it was essentially going to put together a global research program on looking into the next generation of fast reactors. And since the fast reactors were also more susceptible to proliferation, it would be good to have people, A) work together, and then, also think about spent fuel processes and so forth. Again, we ended up calling it the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. OK. Now, we put all that together and then it falls right on its face. And the reason it falls right on its face is because, well, if you don't tell congress about it—well, we couldn't tell congress about it. We wanted to be sure we had everybody lined up before we tell congress about it.

Zierler:

And who else needed to be lined up?

Reis:

The private industry wasn't lined up. The labs were not terribly involved —they would've loved to do it, but the part of the Department of Energy called Nuclear Energy, they said, "Well, we just work with Idaho."

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

You can't get all these other labs.

Zierler:

Yeah. Right.

Reis:

OK. Not telling Private industry was the big—we never told the NEI, Nuclear Energy Institute. We just went ahead and did the—OK.

Zierler:

Was that a mistake in retrospect?

Reis:

Oh, yeah. The big mistake, however, was—and now, looking back, I'm writing about this—also the big mistake was we assumed that, at the time, with the current light-water reactors—it was the nuclear renaissance. Everybody was talking about that. Well, Westinghouse had the AP1000 ready to go. They had, like, 15 or 16 orders. The Chinese were moving ahead. The Russians were moving ahead. So the issue on this one was, well, let's get ahead of that. Let's look at the R and D. That's what we do in the DOD. And let's see if we can get ahead of time. And it was primarily because of the nonproliferation perspective. If you're doing fast reactors and you're reprocessing, you're into another level of potential proliferation 'cause you have all that plutonium around.

Zierler:

Yep.

Reis:

And this is the time to get together with all the other countries. Remember, this was after the Cold War. The Russians were—the Chinese, everybody really liked this idea.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

OK. Problem is, US industry asked what's that stuff all about? You know, we're not ready and our technology really isn’t ready for that. And then it wasn’t long after that when fracking came along.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

Oops. And then Fukushima.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

All right. So, all of the sudden, the bottom fell out of this. But it was basically based on the assumption that, hey, the light-water reactor business is coming back into being and the most important thing for the government to do is just to get the Yucca Mountain—get that away. And companies like Exelon and like Duke and so forth were now making a lot of money on their nuclear reactors.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

But they were not building new ones, they just wanted to keep the old ones going and get that waste off our property —spent fuel off our property —get Yucca Mountain done. They didn't care about the risk of proliferation.

Zierler:

Now, Vic, I want to ask you—I want to connect the dots. If we're saying that fracking contributes to the bottom falling out, then it does beg the question, what's the connection between ongoing civilian nuclear energy and concerns about climate change? Because once fracking comes along—

Reis:

Right, right.

Zierler:

—fracking is, like, accelerating climate change. So how do we connect these things?

Reis:

That's right. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll get to that. Right. So, in any event, I went back and helped the DOE put together—from a nonproliferation perspective. Well, that didn't go anywhere. They brought in a new head of the Nuclear Energy in the DOE. He wasn’t interested in any of this. He didn't want to build a new reactor, he didn't worry about recycling or any of that kind of stuff. Wanted to make sure his drapes were good. And Barack Obama is running for President—all of the sudden, climate now becomes part of the campaign. OK. McCain was also talking about climate—

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

I said, ah, wait a minute, I'm going to try to get ready for the next administration. I look at nuclear power. Yeah. The Democrats may not be enthusiastic about nuclear power. The Republicans don't care less. But let me now start to look at climate, because really, if you scratch it all, if you say, well, by the way, we're now getting fracking so I'm not running out of energy security and whatever. So let me try to look at climate. OK. And, by God, this is 2005 and this becoming pretty serious. I said, climate is the main thrust of why you need nuclear power, but you're going to need a lot of it and you're going to need fast.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

Now, how much you need and fast will work, but it's pretty clear—

Zierler:

Vic, you mean by "fast," scaling up or new projects?

Reis:

Fast, I mean I need a lot of it quickly because climate is happening quickly. In other words, if you're going to get nuclear—I've got one full R and D that's going to come on board 100 years from now—fusion, for example. OK?

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

That sort of thing. OK. It might be fun technology, but—and it doesn’t use carbon, therefore it's fine. But the more I looked into it, the more you began to realize that, oops, this is really very, very, very serious. Will Happer had me down to talk to—

Zierler:

Yep.

Reis:

—Freeman Dyson and, you know, I was in that DOE club.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

OK. Again, I think it's overwhelming and then, what can you do about it? Well, wind is fine, solar is fine, but, boy, I think there are a lot of issues. But I'm at this real juncture, how do you think about climate and nuclear together?

Zierler:

Now, Vic, the world you're operating in, the people that you're talking to, the way that you're looking at this, is climate change denialism or doubt, is this simply a nonfactor in the way that you're thinking or is there some level of caution that maybe this really is not as dire as the Al Gores of the world want us to believe?

Reis:

I think that might've been true 15 years ago.

Zierler:

Yeah, yeah.

Reis:

OK. I think the downside—

Zierler:

I guess my question is—

Reis:

One of the things that Feynman teaches us—and now that I've been reading a lot of Feynman—is that's there's nothing ever sure.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

You've always got to have some doubt.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

So there's always some skepticism involved, but you don't get frozen on that skepticism.

Zierler:

Right, right.

Reis:

You're gonna have to weigh it with some judgment.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

And if I could get back to the reason I'm writing the book is that Eisenhower says, wait a minute, some of these scientists—I'm working at the other end of this thing—they don't necessarily get it. They don't balance the political risks and the other risks and the statecraft risks that you have to deal with. But, again, one of the things that I really think the AIP, in so far as it represents the community, should try to make that clear, is how do you do that?

Zierler:

Right, right.

Reis:

Gee, do you have court proceedings? Do you have—that's what Happer wanted. That's what Steve Koonin wanted.

Zierler:

Yep, yep.

Reis:

So I would almost throw that back, well, how come you get these people who are certainly qualified scientists looking at all the scientists and they say, well, there's still significant doubt? Well, even if there isn’t significant doubt, my sense is, well, there's always doubt, 'cause you're modeling and it's very complicated stuff.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

And you can't—it's hard to do experiments except looking out the window over time. But you need, again, to end up with a policy —so, again, that's how I got to climate. And then, what I've been doing then since then—and at some stage I recognized there are—this whole idea of the light-water reactor that you could make in modules, which is a different way of doing it, as opposed to building the whole thing on the site, building smaller reactors instead of bigger reactors.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

Build them in a factory, put them together. That makes sense. It makes a lot more sense. But that's not the way the industry looked at it. That's not the way people think about it. And where I am now, and I'm sort of leaping ahead to what I'm doing, is saying, well, the way you have to think about that is the way we thought about building airplanes and ships in World War II.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

Where we took it out of the hands of the people who were the designers and we gave it to the people who knew how to do production.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

And that's sort of what we—we now have a couple but really good designs, super safe. I don't know if you're familiar with this work out of NuScale?

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

I don't know whether you want to call this—what's it? You know, it uses free convection instead of forced convection. It's sort of a combination of physics, material—I mean, it's a really wonderful design. And it's built in a factory, but they can't build it fast enough to make any difference. So, again, when I began to look at this stuff, it started from a nonproliferation perspective, and an international perspective. Then you say, well, what's the problem? Is it avoiding making nuclear weapons? Well, yeah, and if that's all you're concerned about, just get out of it.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

You know, just get out of nuclear weapons and stop nuclear power. Not super easy, but once you have the material, it's not that hard to go into the nuclear weapons business. Then, wait a minute, so why do I need nuclear power? The only reason you really want to have nuclear power is because it doesn't have carbon and it's scalable. There's no limit to how many nuclear power plants you can build, and there's a lot of uranium.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

But there are different communities involved, and can you basically put that together? And that's essentially what I worked on at the end of my tour at DOE. And there's one other part that we can go back and talk about, and that's the JCPOA, the Joint—

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

The deal with the Iranians.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

And I wasn’t involved in that directly when I was at DOE, but after that was done, Ernie Moniz asked me to put together a group that would look about what sort of research and development should DOE be doing to support JCPOA. OK. Now—because, after all, JCPOA is primarily a 10-year deal.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

All right. What should we being doing now so that after the 10 years is over, we can do the—well, hmm, that sounded like a Stockpile Stewardship—how do we keep from testing, as well?

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

And we were doing that for about three or four months. I put together a team with the people from the nonproliferation group. We went around and talked to all the laboratories, and it was all the way from how to think about designs—and the way you looked at that is say, well, suppose the Iranians did decide to cheat, what would they do? How would they do it? They had some pretty clever ideas given the stuff that they really have.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

At the same time, however, we wanted the continue to do nuclear power. All right. Gee, we might've talked about this whole idea of the take-back, which was part of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership . So that's all part of the JCPOA.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

So the take-back goes to Russia and parts of it goes back to China. How do we think about all of that stuff, and what is the R and D program underneath that so that that the JCPOA could stay beyond the 10 years? And I'm not going to get into that, because it, as you might expect, gets classified pretty quickly.

Zierler:

Sure.

Reis:

But it could be a wonderful program.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

It was just the sort of thing you need to do. Because, at the same time—and, again, this is how I end my book, as well—I'm saying, hey, look we are really in pretty good shape now in terms of nuclear weapons.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

But I'm still stuck with this fundamental issue of there's no way that, from a physics perspective, I can ensure that, if I have the material, I can't make a bomb. I need inspection. I need international agreements. I need all the things that go with that.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

That connects into climate change, because, if I'm going to use nuclear, I need a lot of it if it's going to make any difference in climate. And you can start there. I'm really going to need a lot of amount of nuclear power and I'm going to need that all over the world, I'm surely going to need it in this country. And the question is, well, how much do you need? Well, you need a lot. And when do you need it? I need it right now—because if you're now serious about climate, it isn't something that's going to happen 50 years from now, it's happening right away.

Zierler:

Right. Right now.

Reis:

Right now. All right. Now, but there's no nuclear business right now.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

Well, how come these guys, they built nuclear—we built 100 plants.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

It's all gone away. And Exelon and Duke Energy and whoever have learned how to run these plants really well. I mean, they got them—but they're not interested in building them anymore. We've lost the ability to build them.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

There's no industry there. There's nothing really.

Zierler:

Yeah. Now, how do you break it down in terms of a lack of political willpower and economic infeasibility?

Reis:

Yeah. I'll say the following, what I'm pushing for is a lot of nuclear power because of climate change. And it's saying that's really a bipartisan approach, but both parties hate it.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Reis:

Right? Republicans don't believe in climate and the Democrats don't believe in a lot of nuclear power.

Zierler:

Yeah, yeah.

Reis:

Right? So it's really bipartisan, right? But I think it will never be economical in the sense that—never is a long time—but I don't think you can get it to be cheaper than natural gas unless people put—unless you have a very large carbon tax.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

Right? And I can go through the numbers, and that's what I do. I like to go through the numbers. And if you just say, well, wait a minute, I've gotta build a big reactor at the site, it's just hard to believe that will ever be cheaper than natural gas.

Zierler:

But are you factoring into that the built-in costs associated with climate change that natural gas combustion—

Reis:

No.

Zierler:

—factors in, too?

Reis:

Right. Unless you put those costs in, it will not be cheaper. But I'm saying, look, yes, you'll need a carbon tax. I mean, look, there are four problems with nuclear, the cost, right? The waste proliferation. There's some other—what's the other thing people worry about? Oh, the waste is the—the spent fuel, the waste that's—

Zierler:

Well, the meltdown issue, as well, right?

Reis:

Yeah. Safety.

Zierler:

Safety. Right.

Reis:

Right. That's one. All right.

Zierler:

And let me ask you on the safety question—

Reis:

Yeah.

Zierler:

—what was your reaction to Fukushima? Did you think that this was like a Japanese problem that was isolated to Japan, or is it the same stuff and it could happen here just as easily and it's a real wakeup call?

Reis:

Well, it was a wakeup call. These were old reactors. They knew there were tsunamis. They didn't know the tsunami was gonna be this bad.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

Right? And the plant's OK but where you put the power support for the cooling went kerflooey, and that's the reason it blew. Of course, many of these things always look dumb in retrospect, right?

Zierler:

Sure, sure.

Reis:

So the problems are with nuclear, as well, is you've gotta get serious government involvement. OK. It's too big a problem to let individual power companies deal with. I think we know how to do that, the stuff on NuScale.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

The modern reactors—by the way, again, the reactor actually did pretty well. Modern reactors are better, and these new reactors where you design safety—no pumps.

Zierler:

Right, right.

Reis:

Right. But you have to build them in quantity to make a difference with—in other words, if you just a few of them, it doesn't address climate change

Zierler:

So this issue of this new technology, the super-safe technology—

Reis:

Yep. Yeah.

Zierler:

—how widely is this technology appreciated among the decisionmakers and the policymakers whose support you would need to move forward on this? I mean, is it known and it's still rejected, or do people not appreciate this?

Reis:

It's that they don't appreciate.

Zierler:

OK. So what's the solution there?

Reis:

And what I'm doing now is trying to get into the Biden—OK, get them basically to think about it.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

And I'm writing little papers to put numbers together and say, hey, look, if you're serious about climate—let's start with that—if you're serious about climate, OK, and look at all the options that you've got—I mean, push wind as much as you can, push solar. The problem with those, of course, is you end up with screwing up the net.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

So even the optimistic solar guy—I've been reading. It says, about 30% is all the system can handle. It needs backup. It needs baseload backup.

Zierler:

Yep.

Reis:

Well, I says, wait a minute, I got a baseload backup for you. OK. So you start off and say, well, I gotta do super safe, right? Hmm. All right. Then I gotta drive the cost down with manufacturing. But don't kid yourself, you're not gonna drive the cost down to below what natural gas is with fracking, 'cause you got so much of fracking gas. But somebody's gotta pay for that carbon, the fact that you're not dumping the carbon out into the atmosphere.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

And, gee, what would it cost—so what I did was put some numbers down, forgetting all the fancy stuff. Hey, you know, for 20 billion dollars a year in 20 years you can replace all the coal plants with small modular reactor plans. I mean, there's details and so forth, but it's 20 billion dollars a year. Now, of course, you're selling electricity back and selling that, but nonetheless, that's just gotta be the price you're paying for the climate change, whether you do that with a tax or not. But don't go into this saying I'm going to produce nuclear power for nothing.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

Because ultimately, it's the safety that you're worried about, and you don't get safety for nothing.

Zierler:

Right, right.

Reis:

Right. And even if you're saying, well, you're overdoing it. I'm saying, yes, right? You've got Fukushima, you've got Kiev, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Even Three Mile Island. So there's two real reasons why what I'm suggesting is a nuclear power problem. One is there's no political will to do it.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

You don't have a lobby like the American Petroleum Institute. You don't have a big industry in the US that basically pushes that.

Zierler:

Now, over the course of this time, Vic, the other X factor here is that solar and wind have really made a—they're increasingly taking up a larger and larger portion of the overall pie. And I would imagine that that would be another factor working against this, as well?

Reis:

Yeah, absolutely. But that's, again, magical thinking, right? The more you do that, the better the—I'm not trying to work against that at all. They should go as fast as they can and we should be looking—the real problem is batteries, of course.

Zierler:

Yeah, yeah.

Reis:

And there are significant environmental issues, right? I mean, the idea of using all that land as opposed to almost no land, and then how does that fit into the network? The distribution network is based on coal and gas centralized plants. So, yeah, at a low percentage of wind and solar makes a lot of sense , but if you push hard on the serious solar guys, they say, "Well, after 20 to 30% it's very hard for us to follow the wind and follow the sun day, night, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we get into all sorts of stability problems and so forth and so on. So you're going to need backup. Well, is that backup going to be fracking? Is that by natural gas or is it going to be coal or is it going to be—or can it be nuclear?

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

But nuclear, you have to pay for it. You can't go in saying this is going to be cheap.

Zierler:

Yep.

Reis:

The other thing, frankly, is the spent fuel, what do you do with that?

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

And the answer is dry cask storage. We have it. It's simple, it's cheap, it's safe. We've been doing it all the time. Why do we have to bury this stuff away for a million years?

Zierler:

Now, Vic, the question of this effort to get the Biden campaign—

Reis:

Yeah.

Zierler:

—get this on their radar. I mean, this is a question that you can apply in all kinds of ways. But to what extent are you pessimistic because the Biden platform is simply going to be Obama part II? Or do you see really an opportunity for a much more—I don't know if progressive is the right term, but self-consciously, you know, we're not just going to be the third Obama administration?

Reis:

Yeah.

Zierler:

Or the third term, I should say.

Reis:

I think if we'd have moved ahead with the Clinton—Obama/Clinton, I think this would have been—this is a serious possibility.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

But you need someone to if Biden himself wants to do this, it can happen.

Zierler:

Yeah, yeah.

Reis:

OK. Clinton wanted a CTB despite everybody. We gave him a CTB and it made sense because we made it into a science problem.

Zierler:

Uh-huh.

Reis:

George W. Bush wanted more nuclear. Well, it turned out over time we could give him more nuclear.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

But there was no push for doing that, and there's no industry to do that. I mean, if you're in the nuclear weapons business, it's all in the government —there's no commercial nuclear weapons business.

Zierler:

Uh-huh.

Reis:

There's nobody trying to make a buck on nuclear weapons. The government owns the whole problem. If you were in the nuclear power business, except for the nuclear submarines, it's the energy business, right?

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

It's the utility business.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

So here's an anecdote: When I left DOE to go back to do nuclear power stuff, I got a call from Admiral DeMars. I don't know if you him, Bruce DeMars. He's two after Rickover.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Reis:

And he was also on the Exelon Board of Directors. And he said, "Vic, I understand you're going to be looking at nuclear power?" I says, "Yes." He said, "That's a great idea. But let me tell you the problem you're going to have." OK. He said, "You're going to go after this from a systems perspective, right? And you're gonna deal with nonproliferation He says, "You gotta remember…” We both graduated in '57, I think.

Zierler:

OK.

Reis:

"When you and I graduated, the top of our class all went into aerospace or defense or something like that. The bottom of the class went into power because that was the easy way."

Zierler:

[laugh] Yeah.

Reis:

He said, "These people are now the presidents of these corporations. And so you're going to tell them about systems stuff, and they won't know what the world you're talking about."

Zierler:

[laugh]

Reis:

"They're just trying to get next quarter—"

Zierler:

Yeah. Wow.

Reis:

He said, "But I'll give you an introduction to the head of the Nuclear Energy Institute, Joe Colvin," who was a navy nuke. And I went over there, gave him the story why this is important. I had talked to Domenici. Dominici says, "Yeah. This is great. We'll support you. This is what I've been trying to do, too." And Colvin says, "Yeah." But he says, "Remember, the Nuclear Energy Institute is run by the utilities." And he said, "And they're interested in two things, they want to get the spent fuel off their facilities. They don't care what you do with it, whether you put in Yucca Mountain, and they would like to extend the life of the current reactors." Because they're now—they've learned how to operate these things so well they're making a fortune.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

I had talked to John Rowe who was head of Exelon at the time. We got to know each other pretty well. He said, "I'm like printing money with these things, they've become so good and they run so well." He said, "And we don't know how to build new ones, but they're coming along, the AP1000”, I think there were 17 or 18 places that had put orders in already.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

But we just look at it from a business perspective, and we're not sure we can make money. Then fracking came along and all these other things. And so it's become a “tragedy of the commons” right?

Zierler:

Yep, yep.

Reis:

So you need a carbon tax or something like that, basically. So the problem is that, in terms of what I'm talking about—I said, "It's not a technology issue." OK. And you can drive the cost of nuclear down, but you'll never drive the cost down to what fracking natural gas will give you. I mean, you're still turning over a turbine and all the rest of it. It's hard to believe you'll turn the cost down. Now, what if the price of natural gas goes up? People said, yeah, but that's the nice part about nuclear is you don't have to worry about the price going up and down. Maybe, but each individual utility makes their own decision, and so the same way nuclear weapons are a national perspective, I'm saying climate is a national perspective.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

All right. Nuclear is carbon-free electricity.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

That's what you're after. And, yeah, nuclear has problems.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

And it's the government that has to solve those problems.

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

OK. Proliferation is not something you want Exelon to be dealing with.

Zierler:

And, Vic, where's the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in all of this? Or do you see them as helpful or not?

Reis:

Well, they're designed to be neutral.

Zierler:

Right. But in reality. Like, for example, I talked to Greg Jaczko. I don't know if you ever ran into Greg?

Reis:

No. Right.

Zierler:

His whole thing was that—and he's a physicist, right—that he was just looking at this—this is his perspective, of course—he was looking at this as an objective issue and he felt like he was just fighting an uphill battle because industry was just totally dominating the way that the commission made its decisions.

Reis:

Yeah. I've known some of the commissioners, Pete Lyons, Ed McGaffigan I worked with. He was a commissioner there. I worked with him at OSTP. Again, Pete Lyons was—I think you get people who lean forward a little bit nuclear, but they're not nuclear crazies.

Zierler:

Right, right.

Reis:

They are seriously into the safety perspective.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

But, like all organizations, they tend to be bureaucratic, right? You want to have them along. OK. Safety is really important. On the other hand, if you're saying, well, this is not a growing area—but I'm just getting out of this area. Why bother? You don't get good people worrying about that. If you're saying there's a future here, they have a mindset, like all organizations, and I don't think that's a bad mindset.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

To have somebody say, wait a minute, let me check that, let me do that again. They were built after Three Mile Island. I think they could be stronger technically. If you could take one of the labs, a Sandia or something, and say, OK, you just work for the safety for the NRC —that would be an ideal, 'cause there the ones who, did safety on the nuclear weapons stuff. That was sort of built into their DNA—that's what they were created for. You'd say, OK, you work for the NRC—the problem, I think, comes in, is that the funding for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission comes from the industry.

Zierler:

Right, right. Yep.

Reis:

So, wait a minute, the industry is going to try to do as little as possible.

Zierler:

Sure.

Reis:

And I'm saying that's a national issue, right? And that gets you at, well, wait a minute, is this private industry doing nuclear?

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

Is this the government doing nuclear?

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

And you'd say, well, it should be just private industry. After all, they're generating electricity and you just regulate it. If you're thinking about climate change, however, now it becomes a government issue—and it's an existential issue.

Zierler:

Yeah. We talked about the game plan for a potential Biden administration.

Reis:

Yeah.

Zierler:

I'll wait 'til the background noise—before I ask.

Reis:

Oh, sure.

Zierler:

No problem.

Reis:

I'll try to think up the answer while the background noise.

Zierler:

It's kind of like hearing from the prison warden. [laugh]

Reis:

It is like hearing from—but it's interesting, is it the nurse or is it the prison? Right.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Reis:

And are these people saving your life or are they—I think that's an interesting—right, yeah. I think they're saying you can't come and visit.

Zierler:

Right, right.

Reis:

There's also a really interesting perspective on how do you deal with old people in general?

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

I don't know if you ever read Atul Gawande? I might've mentioned this.

Zierler:

Sure. He's great.

Reis:

Oh, yeah. And he wrote this book—when I became 80, I read his book on mortality. It doesn't end well, but—

Zierler:

[laugh] So, anyway, my question, Vic—

Reis:

Yeah.

Zierler:

—was you're focusing on the game plan in a potential Biden administration, but what's the game plan if there's a second Trump administration?

Reis:

Yeah, right. I think it's shelter in place.

Zierler:

[laugh] I take it you mean beyond just nuclear issues?

Reis:

I think it—yeah. I think, in a way, my sense is that the real reason you want to have a lot of nuclear power is because of climate.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

And if you're serious about climate, which just gets worse and worse. And you say, I need a lot fast, OK, and I've got to go with all the things that work. And I said, the thing that goes fastest almost—if I say a lot and fast, the only technology I've got available is nuclear. And then you say, well, all right, nuclear has these safety problems. I've got this new reactor just about getting licensed and so forth, which really solved safety. But how do you build a lot of them? I mean, it takes five years, ten years to do it. if it is built in a factory maybe you can do that.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

Well, wait a minute, you've done that before. In World War II we built 50,000 airplanes. Those airplanes were not built at the designer, which was Convair, they were built at Ford.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

And if I'm going to be investing with pandemic money, a good way to invest, once I do the hospitals and do all that stuff, is in manufacturing. Well, gee, I can GE and General Dynamics and all these people to do all that.

Zierler:

And it's funny that we're thinking about this now while we're talking about invoking the Defense Production Act and having GM—

Reis:

Yes.

Zierler:

—do ventilators.

Reis:

Exactly.

Zierler:

So it's like it's on our radar now.

Reis:

And you do it and—I mean, GE would love to do this. I think you wouldn't have to force them to do it. And then you say, well, wait a minute, who is going to run this for the government?

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

I've got one of the best running organizations in the world. It's called nuclear navy. OK.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

They don't have safety problems.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

They don't have operational problems. And they're in the Department of Energy already. And then you say, well, wait a minute, now who's going to operate these things? Well, your local electricity companies—we've got 100 reactors already. These people have learned already how to operate these things. So the pieces are all there, but the politics—one, don't pretend you're going to do this on the cheap. And isn't this great for public/private partnership stuff. You know what I'm saying? If you look at the sort of political risk of this, why would your local electric company even bother with it?

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

Well, the answer is, well, because he gets it for nothing because the government paid for it.

Zierler:

Vic, what do you see as the larger initiative that this would all work out under? Would it be more like a provision in the Green New Deal or would this be part of an infrastructure package?

Reis:

That's a good question. It depends how the politics work out.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

The problem with infrastructure stuff is you're not—a lot of people working on bridges and, we don't have to invent new bridges. It's not a new technology. And there's not that much manufacturing there. This gives you the manufacturing stuff. OK. In that sense it would be part of the Green New Deal. I was on one of these Zoom things sponsored by the Atlantic Council a couple of weeks ago. I got invited to listen in, and these were people who were worrying about climate at the same time you were worrying about the pandemic and nuclear was barely mentioned.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

So it's the connecting of climate and the nuclear. Many of the serious early climate change guys - Jim Hansen - they're all big nuclear supporters, but that hasn’t gotten into the political —

Zierler:

Mm-hmm.

Reis:

I remember all of the Democratic candidates, right, they said—nobody said expand nuclear. They just said, (Biden and the centrists) said let's not throw away the current nuclear, And I'm saying, yeah, that's fine, but that ain't gonna do it for you.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

And you don't want to discourage new wind or solar at all. But what's happening now—what's new, I think, is that all of the sudden there's might be, I think, significant new money, government money.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

OK. And I'm saying it's not going to go away, I'll send a copy of a little thing I wrote to you—but it's not going to be like just the Depression. I'm reading a lot of Roosevelt, too.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

But it was really World War II, and the thing about World War II was that we turned over the whole production system—the arsenal for democracy.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

And that really worked.

Zierler:

Yeah, yeah.

Reis:

Yeah.

Zierler:

So, Vic, unless there are other specific items you want to cover, I think I have—my final question is, obviously, a big theme of our talk today has been, you have a very clear concept of exactly how and why this is such an uphill battle, so good. So in light of that, let's say this plays out exactly the way that you want to, right?

Reis:

Yep.

Zierler:

What are the stars and how do they align to make this happen? How do you conceive of that?

Reis:

Yeah. And furthermore, let me just say, that's exactly the right question, how do you align it? All right. I'm saying that Biden—you can put Trump if you want—but the next president said, hey, this is a government problem in restoring the industrial base of this country, what are all the things we can do with that. The industrial base is part of that. I don't want to screw up climate—how does the world end, in a nuclear weapon catastrophe, a climate catastrophe, or a pandemic?

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

This one or the next one. OK. So I'm saying, I'm saying, wait a minute, this is a government problem. You can't let private industry deal with that. You can't let individuals deal with it. OK. So it really gets down the president. That's what I'm—again, it really was the presidents who did this. It was Eisenhower and all the things he did, and it was Reagan joining with Stars Wars. And then Obama almost got it in the Prague speech.

Zierler:

[laugh] Right.

Reis:

Right? I mean, he touches on all of these things. But then, it's one thing to have the president do it and say let's go do it. But you've got to recognize you cannot expect your local gas company to fix this problem for you. And this is what the Department of Energy was really built for.

Zierler:

Uh-huh.

Reis:

OK. So you need a secretary of energy who would actually understand it.

Zierler:

Right, right.

Reis:

So you would like to have a secretary of energy, and then, within that, I'd say, look, you've got the world's best organization within the Department of Energy to do that. But you'd say, OK, don't stop building submarines and submarine engines, right, but you guys run that program. And as part of that, you tie in NuScale and you can throw in a couple of other—with say General Electric. OK. And we're the government pays—and if you say—let's get rid of coal in 20 years, you put the numbers together and it costs you 20 billion dollars a year.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

Well, 20 billion dollars a year DOE, oh, my God! They're putting 1 billion dollars for nuclear power. But if I'm looking at this from a perspective of—but we just put 2 trillion in for the pandemic.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

And we're going to have to put a trillion in every year for the next 20 years. Wait a minute, this is—is it big enough basically to invest in carbon free nuclear? And that's the way I—I think that's the basic alignment. Now, what's the problem with that? In other words, everything I've said is leadership. I have the technical perspective. I have the industrial perspective. They're all waiting to have it and they would all love to do it. Who do I go to in congress?

Zierler:

Yeah.

Reis:

How do I shape it in such a way that you bring these forces on? You're going to have the coal interests fighting you. Well, maybe they can mine uranium. That's why, by the way, reading about Roosevelt and the New Deal it's actually good, so it's the politics. OK. Further you've got each state regulates things differently. I mean, Vermont, gee, they were the greenest state in the world. They closed down Yankee. They're now—oops, they're not so green anymore.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

California, well, maybe these plants should have been—get out of that argument. The Nuclear Energy Institute, who's does the lobbying, they're just the arm of the utility industry, so they want to just figure out how do we get out of this and still make money? I think, again, all the technical pieces are in place. What you need is leadership, and that leadership has gotta be political leadership, as well. And that's gotta come from the president, and that really is Biden. He's the only one in that crew that I know, it's him. Maybe the AIP can do—the AIP is the home of all the deniers, right? You've got Steve Koonin and Will Happer, all these—they're probably people you've interviewed. I mean, that's an issue, wait a minute—that gets back to Feynman, right?

Zierler:

Right, right.

Reis:

How do you maintain your integrity for science? And we started talking about this, I think, earlier, and it's important. Because the part about science—there's always doubt.

Zierler:

Right, right.

Reis:

Right. On the other hand, you don't want to—when the evidence moves ahead and Newton says, well, yeah, look how these things are going, I mean, he didn't say, well, I'm not sure yet.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Reis:

But the scientific method basically does that. On the other hand, the body politic, right, that's where the Eisenhower, if you will, comes in that says, gee—or Roosevelt—well, we've gotta move ahead.

Zierler:

Right.

Reis:

We can't wait until everything is all decided.

Zierler:

Sure, sure. Well, Vic—

Reis:

OK?

Zierler:

—I think on that note—

Reis:

Right.

Zierler:

I'm so glad that we devoted this second interview to this vitally important and focused topic, and good luck, good luck to you because that means good luck to us all, because this is obviously something that really more people need to hear what it is that you have to say.

Reis:

Yeah.

Zierler:

And to the extent that this interview can be sort of part of that solution, I'm thrilled that we were able to do this again. So thank you, again, for spending the time, and we'll all stay tuned on this one.

Reis:

OK. Great.