"‘You could build a fast breeder reactor that has this U-238 as its fuel, is stuff that we would classify today as nuclear waste. And just like the candle, it prepares its own fuel as it runs.’
‘You encase this fuel, you put it underground, and it burns like a candle for a bunch of years?’
‘Our main approach, the preferred approach, you put the fuel in, and you don't take anything out for 60 years. Now, that's very different than a conventional reactor. Conventional reactor, you have to refuel every 18 months. And then when you take the stuff out, a lot of it is much less radioactive than conventional waste is today, because it's already lasted for 60 years. And its half lives have run down. And so a lot of the nastiest stuff is gone. And then you have the possibility if you wanted to, you could actually reduce some parts of it and burn it for another 60 years. Now, here's the interesting thing. In Paducah, Kentucky, there is a US government facility that stores nuclear waste. In particular, it stores this U-238 waste. Well, there is enough waste in containers in Paducah that US taxpayers are paying people to guard that you could take earth to zero carbon and run it for hundreds of years. Just with the waste that's currently there.’...
‘We had just written Super Freakonomics, Stephen Dubner and I, our second book. And we had worked with a bunch of environmentalists on global warming. And we had this chapter where we talked about global warming, and I think it was a thoughtful and honest chapter. And we predicted correctly that the Copenhagen climate meetings were going to be a pretty much complete failure, and that this moral suasion approach to fighting greenhouse gas emissions wasn't going to work. And ultimately, we argued that we'd need technological solutions to solve the problem. And we never imagined that this would just launch a firestorm of controversy, that he and I would become a Public Enemies number one and two of the environmental movement. And what was so interesting is that all of the other scientists in the face of this mob faded into the background’…
‘If we abandon rationality, in the face of gigantic problems, what the hell are we going to do? Just panic? You have to be rational about it. And unfortunately, when problems become politicized, the political aspect will add a non rational aspect to it. The problem that people had is if you talk about a technological solution, they feel that that takes away from their fire and brimstone is the way I like to describe it...
Pizza is baked with light. It turns out that the air temperature in your pizza oven basically doesn't matter. All of the cooking of the pizza is done by infrared radiation bouncing off the ceiling, the walls and the floor of the oven. And that's true, primarily because you are putting in a very high temperature. In fact, in most woodburning, pizza ovens, it's very funny, the wood is put towards the back of the oven. And the way fresh air gets into the fire, which of course it must do in order to feed the fire is to run right over the pizza. So the pizza actually has a stream of room temperature going it. But in fact, it's the infrared light from the ceiling that does all of the cooking. And we came up with a clever way to do that. We have a little device that makes a shadow over the pizza. Still let the air circulate. And of course, the pizza is raw, where the shadow is’"
People get very upset when you threaten their religion since they'll lose meaning in life
