Is the U.S. Ready for a New Nuclear Age?

Transcript for Season 5, Episode 3: Is the U.S. Ready for a New Nuclear Age?

Archival - News Clip from 1984: Citizen groups failed in their latest attempts to get the courts to prevent the startup of California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant… [FADE UNDER]

HOST: To understand the U.S.'s complicated relationship with nuclear power, look no further than Diablo Canyon.

[MUSIC IN]

HOST: Protests there started well before the nuclear power plant became active in 1985. 

Archival - News Clip from 1984: Reporter: Do you oppose this plant and do you join in the fight against it? Protester: Yes I do.

HOST: Activists in California told reporters at the time that they were worried about the threat of a nuclear meltdown.

For decades after its activation, environmentalists and nuclear activists gathered in the town near the plant to call for its closure. 

Then, in 2016, the utility that ran the plant announced that it would shut down both reactors at Diablo Canyon by 2025. The reason wasn’t safety, though. It was cost. Renewables like wind and solar had become cheaper competitors. And though shutting down a nuclear reactor is expensive, the closure could potentially cost less than letting it run.

[MUSIC OUT]

Archival - Democracy Now!: California is going nuclear free. On Tuesday one of the states’ largest utilities agreed to a proposal endorsed by environmental groups and labor unions to shut down Diablo Canyon. [FADE UNDER] 

HOST: Protesters were thrilled. But then, at the end of last year, the state walked the agreement back. 

California regulators, supported by Governor Gavin Newsom, voted to keep the plant open – and keep operating until at least 2030.

The announcement surprised a lot of people, but to many energy experts… it kind of made sense.

Diablo Canyon produces almost nine percent of the state’s power, making it California’s largest source of always-on, emissions-free energy. So, without it, the state would likely have trouble meeting its decarbonization goals.

The tug of war surrounding Diablo Canyon’s existence, it’s an object lesson; a window into the larger story of nuclear power in the United states, from its high point in the 1970s to its nadir, decades later. And now, its re-entry into the spotlight.

[THEME MUSIC IN]

HOST:  There are 94 nuclear reactors in America, across 28 states. That’s more than what you’d find in any other country. But, as a percentage, nuclear energy contributes a lot less to the total U.S. power supply than it does elsewhere.

Countries like France, Canada, and South Korea all invested in nuclear power well into the 21st century, while America scaled back.

And now, facing the threat of climate change, we're left wondering: how big a player will nuclear be in our energy future?

That’s today on the show: how the U.S.'s nuclear ambitions went from full-on to a trickle, and how the government plans to resurrect it.

I’m Arielle Duhaime-Ross, and this is The World as You’ll Know It. 

[THEME MUSIC OUT]

HOST: The story of nuclear in the U.S. is about risk – how we perceive it and how we assess it. And no one is better at explaining that tension than Richard Rhodes. 

[MUSIC IN]

Richard Rhodes: I was eight years old in 1945. And my whole childhood basically had been the Second World War. Cars couldn't get gas and tires and so the streets were empty and so we got to play in the streets. All of the delivery companies reverted to horse drawn wagons, so we got to watch horses going around.

HOST:  Rhodes is a journalist and historian. He’s been writing about science and all things nuclear for almost 40 years — an interest he developed early in life.

Richard Rhodes: But at the same time, in many windows up and down the street there were these black velvet drapes with a gold star on them that meant someone in that family had been killed in the war. A father, a son, a brother. 

[MUSIC OUT]

Richard Rhodes: So there was this double sense of horror and excitement. And then suddenly one day in August of 1945, the news came over the radio that one bomb or two bombs of a new kind had ended the war. Of course, that's not quite true, but, but that's what everyone felt and thought at the time. And as an eight year old, I was immediately dumbstruck by the whole thing, and began at that point to be interested in science, and particularly in physics.

HOST: In 1986, Rhodes published “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” a narrative account of the people and nuclear science that led to the world’s first atomic weapons. Weapons that killed thousands of civilians in Japan and changed warfare forever.

The book won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, and made him something of a celebrity in nuclear circles. It also helped him understand the deep-seated conflicts around the issue of nuclear power.

Richard Rhodes: You know I started writing about it when I was basically making my living as a magazine article writer in the 1970s, before I started writing my book about the bomb, And most journalists were opposed to nuclear power in a kind of knee-jerk way. And I picked up on that, and I was, too. So I wrote about nuclear power as if it was a danger and a threat. It was only as I got to know the scientists at Los Alamos and elsewhere who had worked on the bomb during the war, when I was researching my book, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”, and came to see that they were honorable and honest people. And that when they told me nuclear power is a great gift to the world, I realized that if I believed them about anything, I was going to have to believe them about that. 

HOST:  In 1953 – when Rhodes was 16 – President Eisenhower gave a speech at the United Nations emphasizing both the danger of atomic weapons, and the peaceful use of nuclear energy.  

Archival - Eisenhower: The atomic age has moved forward at such a pace that every citizen of the world should have some comprehension, at least in comparative terms… [FADE UNDER]

Richard Rhodes: After the war, once the United States and other countries realized that there was no shortage of uranium in the world, it began to be possible to think about using nuclear technology not only for war time, but also for peacetime. 

Archival - Eisenhower: My country wants to be constructive, not destructive. It wants agreements not wars among nations.

Richard Rhodes: The development was pushed and advanced during the Eisenhower era. Largely because the Soviet Union, our major competitor, had started to develop reactors that could be used to generate electricity. And out of that came a nuclear power industry that probably could have waited a little longer to get started. 

HOST: The technology was brand new, and, as Rhodes sees it, the way utilities went about developing nuclear energy in the U.S. was pretty haphazard. 

Richard Rhodes: All the utilities wanted to have their very own nuclear power reactor, each one being built separately. No common production line somewhere. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: What was the feeling around nuclear energy back then in the U. S.? 

[MUSIC IN]

Richard Rhodes: It was a bit too cavalier. I mean, the CEO of one utility would be playing golf with the CEO of another utility, and he would say, “We got our reactor going. How are you doing?” And the other guy would think, “Oh, damn, we'd better get going with the nuclear power system, too.” They said, well, it’s just another way to boil water. 

HOST:  In the 1970s, 50 nuclear reactors went online in the U.S.

Richard Rhodes: It was a great time of confusion and mistakes and, and I guess it probably culminated, if one likes to think of it this way, in the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979.

Archival - WNEP: Good evening. The news tonight is not encouraging. To sum it up in a word, it is still confusing from Harrisburg. To bring you up to the minute… (FADE UNDER)

Archival - ABC News: It was an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which is located on an island... [FADE UNDER]

HOST: In 1979, one of the reactors at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown caused by a combination of equipment malfunction and operator error. 

The accident took place just 12 days after the release of a movie called “The China Syndrome,” a thriller about a meltdown at a nuclear reactor that gets covered up by the plant’s owners. The timing amplified a sense of fear and paranoia.

[MUSIC OUT]

Archival - WNEP: At a news conference earlier this afternoon, Governor Thornburg suggested pregnant women and preschool children within a five mile radius of Three Mile Island leave the area. And residents within a ten mile radius have been urged to stay indoors indefinitely.

HOST: The news was scary and the whole thing made the industry look terrible. And yet, no one died at Three Mile Island. There were no injuries. The average amount of radiation to which residents nearby were each exposed was actually lower than that of a chest X-ray. So it wasn’t the nuclear disaster that was feared.

Richard Rhodes: But that's not what people felt and heard. Everyone who was listening was attuned to the feeling that some terrible accident had occurred in Pennsylvania that could have very well destroyed the whole state.

HOST: Three Mile Island changed how nuclear energy was perceived in the U.S. The industry was forced to shift. New safety measures, new regulations, and a very motivated anti-nuclear movement slowed the building of new plants to a crawl. 

Richard Rhodes: All sorts of new safety systems were added on. Training of the operators was included. There was a general sense that nuclear had been developed too quickly and too carelessly, if you will.

HOST: The price of oil didn’t help. Oil prices had hit a new high in 1979, but dropped by more than two-thirds over the next six years. With oil so cheap, the big push behind nuclear – and other technologies like solar power – was over. 

Richard Rhodes: Nuclear power plants that were scheduled to be built in the later 1970s got canceled one by one, because it simply wasn't needed. 

HOST: The U.S. did actually add more reactors after that, but never with the zeal it once had. From 1979 to 1988, 67 planned nuclear projects were canceled.  

So, at its peak, in 1991, the U.S. had 112 reactors in operation. That number today is down to 94. Collectively these plants produce around 18 percent of the energy consumed in the U.S. 

Now, eighteen percent is nothing to sniff at. But if you compare that to France, you start to get a sense of the global nuclear energy imbalance. Because France gets around 70 percent of its energy from nuclear. And, per capita, it releases about one third of the carbon released in the U.S. – largely because of the country’s nuclear capacity.

When I spoke with Rhodes, I asked him about a conversation he once had with Marcel Boiteux, who in the 70s and 80s, came to be known as “the architect of the French nuclear program.” 

Richard Rhodes: I was curious to know if there had been resistance on the part of environmentalists and others in France to their development of 80% nuclear power dominance of their energy supply. This was a man who had lived through all of that development and in the later stages that actually led it. And he was indignant at my question. He said, “There was great resistance in France.” He said, “My apartment was blown up to the seventh floor by anti-nuclear activists at one point.” He said, “But when the president of France announced that nuclear power wasn't a utility problem but a French problem, everybody lined up behind it.”

HOST: By “French problem,” he means that France didn’t want to depend on other countries for fossil fuels. It wanted the security that could come with greater energy independence.

Richard Rhodes:  So they saw it in a very French way, I think, as a national challenge that they were going to meet. 

[MUSIC IN]

HOST: Today, climate experts, policy experts, and the White House argue that the U.S. needs to make a similar commitment to nuclear energy to make a real dent in its carbon emissions.

And think about it: every time the U.S. shut down a reactor, that region had to turn to another form of energy to fill the gap.  

After New York state shut down its Indian Point nuclear facility in 2021, for instance, emissions from in-state gas generation rose 35%.  

But building new nuclear power plants is expensive and time consuming. So, if nuclear really is that important, is it too late to use it to reach our climate goals?

[MUSIC OUT]

[SOUND OF SIRENS]

Kathryn Huff: Our hope too, is that. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Actually, sorry, I'm hearing a siren. Is that on your end?

Kathryn Huff: Oh, yeah. It's the motorcade. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Of course it is. Well, maybe we'll keep that in then.  

Kathryn Huff: [Laughter] [FADE UNDER]

HOST: When I spoke with Dr. Kathryn Huff, she was in her office in Washington, D.C., near the White House. At the time, she was the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy.

Kathryn Huff: I suppose my first exposure to a nuclear reactor was around, I was probably 17, I visited Texas A&M’s research reactor, with my dad, who was working there at the time, as a research scientist. 

HOST: She's now returned to teaching at the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign. She's also a nuclear engineer and an expert in advanced reactor designs. 

Kathryn Huff: Thought about becoming a nuclear engineer right off the bat as an undergrad, but ultimately applied to the University of Chicago in physics. I later would get a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from Wisconsin. 

HOST: So Huff seemed like the right person to describe the landscape of nuclear power in the U.S. today.

Kathryn Huff: There are 94 operating nuclear reactors at 54 locations. And it's almost half of our clean electricity. Which makes it the largest single source of emissions-free power in the country. And we're going to need to grow possibly triple the capacity of nuclear power in this country in order to support net zero.

HOST: Triple our capacity for nuclear power. By 2050. That seems like a tall order. But Huff pointed out that there are many ways to grow our nuclear capacity.

Kathryn Huff: Having new reactors come online is great. It, you know, is the right direction. If we're going to run, we should start by not walking backwards, which is what we were doing. And now I think there's a lot more interest – we're even seeing real interest in restarting former nuclear power plants that did shut down because of economics. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Really?

Kathryn Huff: Yeah.

HOST: Ok, so – yes, those old, put out to pasture reactors? Many of them are still standing. 23, in fact.

But if we’re going to reactivate them, safety is bound to be on a lot of people’s minds. So I asked Huff about the risks involved with nuclear power and how they stack up against other energy sources.  

Kathryn Huff: There are approximately 200,000 premature deaths in the United States every year because of pollution. And much of that pollution is caused by emitting sources of energy. Nuclear power and the operations of nuclear power does not kill people. 

HOST: Much of the fear around nuclear energy is about catastrophes. But we often forget about the less headline-grabby risks associated with fossil fuels. 

Kathryn Huff: Even if you include Chernobyl and Fukushima, the worldwide deaths per terawatt hour are just magnitudes different than unabated fossils. So Three Mile Island, do you know how many people it killed? 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Zero.

Kathryn Huff: Zero people![Laughter] And that's because the nuclear sector is overseen by the strongest regulator that we have, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

HOST: There was one more issue I wanted to talk about with Huff. And that was waste. 

Even though nuclear energy is emissions free, it does produce waste — radioactive waste – in the form of spent fuel rods. And that’s a source of concern for a lot of people, too. 

Kathryn Huff: And so the highest risk is like, right when you take it out of the reactor and from there on out it is exponentially decaying and risk and radiation. And so we leave it in the reactor pool for, you know, a few years until it's quite cool and we pull it out of the pool, dry it off, and put it in a spent fuel cask, which is made of steel and usually concrete.

HOST: Those concrete casks? Huff says they’re really effective. 

Kathryn Huff: You can walk up and touch it. [Laughter] Just a few weeks ago, I walked up and touched the ones at North Anna nuclear power station right there in Virginia. And I'm fine. You know, I haven't grown any new heads. [Laughter]

[MUSIC IN]

Kathryn Huff: I strongly encourage anyone like skeptical or suspicious or curious about nuclear power to find the closest university with a research reactor. They have visitor tours. You can sign up and look straight down into a reactor, right into the pool. Because it doesn't have to be a mystery. And I think the mystery drives the fear. 

HOST: Listen, I’ve been covering science for more than a decade, and I had never heard of this kind of tour before. When I think of nuclear research, I think of the large hadron collider. Not a nuclear reactor… at my local university. 

But, of course, Huff was right. And I happen to live very near to a research reactor – one that I soon found out is unique in the country, because it’s the only one that’s run primarily… by undergrads.  

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Alright, so this is the door to the facility, right? This is a door to the reactor. 

Elio DiMauro: Yes. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Like, we're outside right now. We're about to go in. [SCAN SOUND] 

HOST: The facility in question is the research reactor at Reed College — a small, liberal arts college, in Portland, Oregon. 

Elio DiMauro: Our reactor was installed in 1965 and first ran critical in 1968. So a very long time… [FADE UNDER]

HOST: And the person taking me on this tour is Elio DiMauro, a physics student. 

Elio Dimauro: We're going to be going into the control room first. So we're going to leave bags here… [FADE UNDER] 

HOST: To enter the reactor room, you first have to go through a control room – this really old school, bunker-like space that’s home to equipment that looks like it’s from the 70s – mostly because it is. 

Students: Hello!

Elio DiMauro: This is where all the magic happens… [FADE UNDER]

HOST: Except that, once you’re in there, to get to the desk where all the controls are, you have to walk through saloon doors – like western-style – you know, those wooden flappy doors.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: And the saloon doors that I had to go through to get into this room – for fun? 

Auden Oliveri: No, they do serve a purpose. The saloon doors help remind us to stay behind the console when we're operating.

HOST: That’s Auden Oliveri. Oliveri is a chemistry student and a senior reactor operator.   

Auden Oliveri: It's just a visual and, like, physical reminder to not step away. 

HOST: Adjacent to the control room is the reactor room. We walk in and it’s basically this really nice workshop: tables, equipment. But then, in the center of the room, there’s this giant well. 

And, at the bottom of that well, 25 feet below us, is the reactor’s core.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Right now I'm looking into this pool… 

Elio DiMauro: Yes.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Which means that I am looking into an active nuclear reactor. 

Elio DiMauro: You are looking into an active nuclear reactor at 171KW… [FADE UNDER]

HOST: Compared to the large-scale reactors we’ve been talking about, like Three Mile Island or Diablo Canyon, the Reed reactor… Well, it’s puny.  

Great for research, and it’s not about to power much of anything. 

[MUSIC IN]

HOST: But when you’re in the room, it doesn’t feel small or underpowered. It feels incredibly cool. And sort of fantastical. Probably because of the blue glow.

Elio DiMauro: It glows like nothing else you'll see naturally. It's like it's a very odd kind of glow.  

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: For folks at home, it's not just a blue glow. It's like a blue thick powder that sort of coats everything. You know when it's just snowed and there's just like a light snow powder covering everything? Imagine that that was blue and glowed. That’s what it looks like, and it is absolutely mesmerizing. 

Elio DiMauro: It is, yeah.

HOST: The glow is caused by what’s called Cherenkov Radiation, from the particles near  the reactor traveling at speeds faster than light – in water.

By the way, to experience all this? No safety gear required. Because the 25,000 gallons of water that the nuclear rods are submerged in block radiation from being released into the room. 

[MUSIC OUT]

Elio DiMauro: Every tour, someone asks us what would happen if someone were to jump in. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Okay. What would happen if somebody were to jump in? 

Elio DiMauro: And they would be fine. As long as you stayed at the top of the water.  If you were to swim down all the way to the core, you wouldn't make it back up.

HOST: One of the misconceptions that the undergrads end up having to clear up pretty often is the fear that Reed’s reactor might one day… melt down.

HOST: Auden Oliveri again. 

Auden Oliveri: There are some inherent design features of our reactor fuel that can help shut down the reactor. If everything else fails, our reactor can still be shut down. And it's actually, like, physically impossible. Like against the laws of physics for our reactor to meltdown, which is really cool. 

HOST: One of the other students here, Grace Mauk, a chemistry and political science major, told me about how working here has impacted her conversations back home, in Texas.

Grace Mauk: Whenever I go back home and I tell people, “Oh, yeah, I work at a nuclear reactor,” there is a lot of misconceptions, a lot of fear maybe. People remember disasters like Fukushima and Chernobyl. And they sort of ask me, like, “Is it safe? Like, is this really the future of energy if, you know, disasters like this have happened?” And I really enjoy clearing up those misconceptions, because nuclear really is the future of energy. It's the only scalable and sustainable force of renewable energy we have, at the moment. 

[MUSIC IN]

HOST: Kathryn Huff was right. Seeing a reactor up close, it really demystified the whole thing for me, and made nuclear feel accessible, present. 

Ok… the big question now: what is it going to take to scale nuclear energy in the U.S.? Well, here’s your answer: a ton of money. 

Take the most recent nuclear reactors to come online in the us: at Georgia's Plant Vogtle. They took over 17 years to build — seven more than was initially planned – and they cost a whopping $35 billion –$17 billion over budget.

But Huff says that the cost is bound to come down. 

[MUSIC OUT]

Kathryn Huff: That same reactor technology was built approximately on time and on budget in China four times. So it's not really about the reactor technology.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Mmm.

Kathryn Huff: It's about our muscle at building mega projects and our ability to manage what is not just a complex project, but a complicated one. The U.S. hasn't built reactors like this in a really long time. And getting that muscle going again has been costly and it's taken longer than it intended. But I think a lot of things have been not only learned through that project, but exercised. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Right.

Kathryn Huff: For example, thousands, I think, maybe 8,000 at peak and 13,000 total, skilled crafts trades union workers were at Plant Vogtle. And can now say that like, “Hey, I've worked on building a nuclear power plant and I'm ready to help build a new one.”

HOST: So we’re rusty. but now there are thousands of workers in the U.S. who know how to do this. And that means that, hopefully, it won’t take nearly as much time or money to build the next one. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: From the federal government's perspective, what exactly is the plan for nuclear energy and how does that relate to climate change? 

Kathryn Huff: We absolutely have to get to net zero by 2050. We need to, in order to do that, get to a zero carbon electric grid by 2035. Continuing to operate, as I said, the existing nuclear power plants is absolutely critical to that. But building new nuclear power plants quickly is going to be really important for net zero.

HOST: Two major pieces of legislation are aimed at helping make that happen: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. We've talked about them a lot this season. 

Those two bills combined could end up pumping over $12 billion into the nuclear energy sector.

Which… isn’t all that much, actually. If you remember, Vogtle cost 35.

So I asked Huff how many of those reactors we actually need to build. 

[MUSIC IN]

Kathryn Huff: You'd have to build 200 new ones. 

HOST: And so we’ll need a lot more than $12 billion dollars. But the nuclear industry is working on alternatives  – one of which involves making…

Kathryn Huff: Small modular reactors. 

HOST: Small modular reactors, or SMRs. This is what most people in the industry call the future of nuclear energy. And how big is small? 

Kathryn Huff: They're about a third in size and a third in capacity. 

HOST: And that’s a huge advantage, because making them smaller gives us more options, and saves a lot of money.

Kathryn Huff: The smaller you can get, the lower the capital cost, therefore the lower risk on a customer. The quicker, ideally, one can build, and the more you can adopt modular construction approaches. This notion of modularity is that you would build and assemble components of this plant at a small modular reactor factory and ship those modules out and put them together on site

HOST: They might also be safer, because the way we build reactors has improved over the decades.

But, these small modular reactors – they’re still in the development phase. None of them are in operation yet, at least in the U.S.

Kathryn Huff: I really recommend a universe in which we see different reactor sizes and types for different applications. You know, some residential and critical infrastructure may need just ten megawatts, and they may need it to be the kind of power that's always-on, 24/7, 365 days a year. But they only need ten megawatts of it. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Hmm.

Kathryn Huff: A former coal plant that used to produce 300 megawatts? That's a perfect opportunity for a small modular nuclear reactor around the 300 megawatt range. And, there are a number of coal plants destined to retire…

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Right. 

Kathryn Huff: Or which have already retired. We cannot leave those communities behind in a clean energy transition. Not only do they sit on an incredible resource, which is the transmission of hundreds of megawatts that will suddenly be, you know, not transmitting the megawatts, having that transmission centered around a community, a real valuable resource that something like a nuclear power plant can easily repurpose. And so a sort of one-to-one switch out of unabated coal plants with new, smaller, modular nuclear reactors could really leverage not just that electric grid, but also the workers and the communities in the vicinity. 

[MUSIC IN]

HOST: There are a lot of moving pieces here in this plan. A lot of new technologies to implement and, of course, a lot of people to convince. But, with a general move toward a carbon-free future, the timing feels ripe. 

Kathryn Huff: My assessment is that while my parents' generation was afraid and concerned about the atomic bomb, that was the existential threat facing their generation, my generation and everyone younger than it, the existential threat facing us is climate change. It's real. It's present, it’s coming. We can see its effects every day. We see more and more of its effects every day. And the existential threat facing us, drives towards decarbonization as quickly as possible, and a recognition that one should use the proven technologies that are already our largest source of clean, carbon-free power, including nuclear power [Laughter].

HOST: Next week, we’ll look at whether we can keep cool without heating up our planet.

Daniel Betts: So if air conditioning could be flexible in its load and ultrahigh efficiency, that would enable us to solve the principal things that make air conditioning unsustainable. And that discussion led to innovation, of course.

Rachel Kyte: But I think that the cooling revolution is at a very early stage and will need to be something that, you know, which is something which of the United States is very good at, right, putting capital together with entrepreneurship and research

HOST: I’m Arielle Duhaime-Ross. We’ll be back next week.

[MUSIC OUT]

[CREDITS MUSIC IN]

HOST: The World As You’ll Know It is brought to you by Aventine, a non-profit research institute creating and sharing work that explores how today’s decisions could affect the future. The views expressed don’t necessarily reflect those of Aventine, its employees or affiliates. 

For a transcript of the episode and more resources related to what you've heard in today's episode, please visit Aventine.org/podcast. 

Danielle Mattoon is the Executive Director at Aventine. Bruce Headlam is the Editorial Director at Aventine.

This episode was produced by Alexis Moore, with support from Elliot Adler, Lisa Cerda, and me, Arielle Duhaime-Ross. Additional writing and producing from Bruce Headlam. Our Editor is Eric Mennel. Kamilah Kashanie is our Managing Producer. 

Original music by Vera Weber and Davy Sumner, with additional music from Epidemic Sound.

This episode was mixed by Marina Paiz.

Our recording engineers are Pedro Alvira, Hannis Brown, and Davy Sumner. Additional support from Sharon Bardales and Jade Brooks. 

Research and fact checking by Will Tavlin. Creative direction and design by Curt Courtenay  and Lauren Viera. 

Music licensing by Extreme Music and Epidemic Sound. 

Our Executive Producer is Je-Anne Berry. 

Special thanks to Emerald O’Brien and Xandra Ellin.

I'm your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross.

Make sure to listen to us on the Audacy app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Ok, I have one last question for this group. 

Undergrad Group: Yeah. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Nuke-lee-uhr or nuke-u-luhr? 

Student: Nuclear? I hardly know her! [Laughter]