Is nuclear power too slow, too expensive, or too essential to ignore? In this episode of Saving the World from Bad Ideas, Mark Lynas sits down with Baroness Bryony Worthington — crossbench peer, climate policy architect, and co-host of the Cleaning Up podcast — to take on Bad Idea #34: “Nuclear? No Thanks.”
🧠 Topics Discussed:
● ⚛️ Why nuclear costs haven’t fallen — and why China may change that
● 🇫🇷 What France got right (and wrong) in its Mesmer-era nuclear buildout
● 🇨🇳 China’s nuclear ecosystem: HTRs, molten salts, SMRs, and industrial policy
● 🧱 Why huge gigawatt-scale reactors fail — and when modularity matters
● 🌡️ Heat: the forgotten one-third of global energy that renewables struggle to replace
● 🇺🇸 The growing bipartisan nuclear consensus in the U.S.
● 🔥 Geothermal, CSP, and advanced drilling as zero-carbon heat sources
● 👾 AI and data centres: the quiet driver of surging electricity demand
● 🧪 Thorium, molten salt reactors, and the cult of “better nuclear”
● ♻️ Nuclear waste, fuel recycling, plutonium, and the politics of the NRC
● 🛡️ Risk, radiophobia, and why safety rules became so irrational
● 🌍 Authoritarianism, industrial strategy, and what China’s system gets right (and wrong)
👩🏫 Guest Bio: Baroness Bryony Worthington is a crossbench member of the UK House of Lords and one of Britain’s most respected climate policy thinkers. She was a lead author of the UK’s Climate Change Act, co-founded the children’s environmental charity Sandbag, and serves as co-host of the global energy podcast Cleaning Up with Michael Liebreich. Bryony currently leads work on clean industrial transitions, including repowering coal infrastructure with zero-carbon heat from nuclear, geothermal, and advanced solar technologies.
📚 Recommended Reading & Resources
● Cleaning Up podcast – https://www.cleaningup.live
● BloombergNEF – https://about.bnef.com
● Kairos Power (advanced reactors) – https://kairospower.com
● Oklo (fast microreactors) – https://www.oklo.com
● TerraPower (Natrium reactor) – https://www.terrapower.com
● High-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTR info) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_gas-cooled_reactor
● Molten salt reactor background – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor
● Tsinghua University Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology – https://www.inet.tsinghua.edu.cn/ineten/
● Repower Initiative – https://www.repower.world/
● Jamie Beard on geothermal – https://www.texasgeo.org
● IAEA on nuclear fuel recycling – https://www.iaea.org/topics/spent-fuel-management
● Waste Not (WePlanet nuclear fuel recycling report) – https://www.weplanet.org/reports/waste-not
● China’s solar overcapacity & exports – https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy
● Our World in Data: electricity mix – https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
💬 Quote Highlights:
“Once you build nuclear, you never regret it — it just quietly produces heat and power for 80 years.”
“China has already built almost everything we were going to tell them to try.”
“Heat is a third of global energy. Batteries can’t solve that. Nuclear can.”
“Radiation is everywhere — from rocks, from the sun, from your partner in bed. We’ve regulated nuclear as if none of this exists.”
“I’m not pro-nuclear everywhere. I’m pro-nuclear where it makes the transition faster.”
“I’m a pro-humanity environmentalist. Nuclear is part of that story.”
🌐 About WePlanet:
WePlanet is a global citizen and science movement challenging bad ideas and championing evidence-based solutions for climate, nature, and human well-being. Learn more at https://weplanet.org
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