Episode
⚛️ Our fission-powered future: My chat (+transcript) with nuclear scientist and author Tim Gregory
- Published
- Aug 12, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 1640
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/faster-please-the-podcast-5630783/episodes/our-fission-powered-future-my-chat-transcript-with-nuclear-scientist-and-author-tim-gregory/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/faster-please-the-podcast-5630783/our-fission-powered-future-my-chat-transcript-with-nuclear-scientist-and-author-tim-gregory.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, Nuclear fission is a safe, powerful, and reliable means of generating nearly limitless clean energy to power the modern world. A few public safety scares and a lot of bad press over the half-century has greatly delayed our nuclear future. But with climate change and energy-hungry AI making daily headlines, the time — finally — for a nuclear renaissance seems to have arrived. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast , I talk with Dr. Tim Gregory about the safety and efficacy of modern nuclear power, as well as the ambitious energy goals we should set for our society. Gregory is a nuclear scientist at the UK National Nuclear Laboratory . He is also a popular science broadcaster on radio and TV, and an author. His most recent book, Going Nuclear: How Atomic Energy Will Save the World is out now. In This Episode * A false start for a nuclear future (1:29) * Motivators for a revival (7:20) * About nuclear waste . . . (12:41) * Not your mother’s reactors (17:25) * Commercial fusion, coming soon . . . ? (23:06) Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. A false start for a nuclear future (1:29) The truth is that radiation, we're living in it all the time, it's completely inescapable because we're all living in a sea of background radiation. Pethokoukis: Why do America, Europe, Japan not today get most of their power from nuclear fission, since that would've been a very reasonable prediction to make in 1965 or 1975, but it has not worked out that way? What's your best take on why it hasn't? Going back to the ’50s and ’60s, it looked like that was the world that we currently live in. It was all to play for, and there were a few reasons why that didn't happen, but the main two were Three Mile Island and Chernobyl .…