63. Powering A Humane Future with Zion Lights

“I changed my mind because I cared about alleviating energy poverty.”

Order now: Energy is Life: Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear, by Zion Lights

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Zion Lights is an award-winning science communicator and environmental advocate whose work sits at the intersection of energy, climate, and public understanding of science. In this conversation, Zion shares her journey from prominent renewable-only activism to evidence-led support for a broader clean energy mix, and why energy abundance matters for health, dignity, and human progress.

Connect with Zion 

• Website – zionlights.co.uk
• Newsletter –substack.com/@zionlights1

Topics we cover

• How Zion’s views shifted after revisiting the evidence on nuclear risk, safety, and climate mitigation 
• Why “clean energy” beats “renewables-only,” and what grid reality means for net zero pathways 
• Energy poverty, global fairness, and what reliable power enables for health systems and development
• SMRs, fusion, and what is realistic now versus what is still “next decade” tech

Resources & further reading

• “Could we even ‘just stop oil’?” – The Holyoake Lecture 2023, with Zion Lights (video)
• Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR15) – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018)
• Death rates per unit of electricity production – Our World in Data
• What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy? – Our World in Data

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome Zion Lights
• 1:31 Questioning Anti‑Nuclear Beliefs
• 4:42 Weapons, Fear, and The Simpsons
• 6:51 Net Zero, IPCC, and a Decarbonised Energy Mix
• 9:44 Grid Limits, Storage, and Regulatory Restraints
• 13:57 Energy Poverty And Global Justice
• 15:45 UK Policy, Permitting, and Public Consent
• 20:08 Speed, Standardisation, and the French Model
• 28:05 Fusion Hype, SMRs,and What Works Now
• 32:25 Nuclear Waste: Facts Versus Myths
• 35:56 Shifting Public Perception and Trust in Data
• 41:31 Changing Minds On Gene Editing

Transcript

James Hogson: 0:01

Welcome to the Humanism Now podcast. I'm your host, James Watson. Our guest today is Xion Lights. Xeon is an award-winning science communicator and environmental advocate who specializes in making complex science clear and compelling. Her work explores energy, climate, and technology through the lens of the human challenges, showing how curiosity and evidence can shape a better future. Xeon's forthcoming book is Energy is Life, which shows how science, technology, and the choices we make today can transform our energy systems and bring power to those who need it most. She's also a patron of Humanist GK and a recipient of the Holy Oak Lecture Medal. Xion Lights, welcome to Humanism Now.

Zion Lights: 0:47

Thank you for having me. Nice to see you again, James.

James Hogson: 0:49

Congratulations, first of all, on the publication of the book, which hopefully will be out shortly after we publish this episode. But perhaps we can begin at the beginning how you got to be involved in science, communication, and activism, particularly in the area of nuclear energy, which this book focuses on. Listeners may think this might be a bit of a different topic for us here at Humanism Now, but as you mentioned, we met at the Humanist UK convention a couple of years ago, and you shared your really powerful story. So I'd like to start at the beginning. And just for listeners who don't know, what has been your story, your journey to this point, and what evidence shifted your thinking?

Zion Lights: 1:30

As an environmentalist, I was very involved in a lot of different organizations. And so nuclear and energy were part and parcel of that. There was no getting away from it. And we were against it, we're anti-it. The same as we were against fossil fuels. And the fossil fuels thing always made sense to me. And for a long time the nuclear thing did too when I attended protests. And I in my mind, when I thought of nuclear energy, I thought of weapons. And a lot of people still do. And there were a lot of people in these organizations who older, much older activists who had experienced the fear of nuclear weapons and they had stories about it. So I kind of believed all of that.

James Hogson: 2:10

Yeah, I think we should mention you were quite a prominent activist in on the purely renewable side of energy transition. For a long time.

Zion Lights: 2:18

For a long time. Yeah, that is correct. That was our solution. And I that was fine. I completely agreed with that because everyone around me told me that was correct. I was quite young and I wasn't really questioning yet. And I had never seen anything to disprove it. So when I started to see information that disproved it, and I started to come across things that kind of told me that some of the things I believed, I believed things like Fukushima killed loads of people. Well, it it the meltdown didn't. The nobody died because of the meltdown, the tsunami did and the earthquake. Then I thought, oh, hold on, that's not what I was told. Maybe, maybe I'm wrong. And it was not a slow process, it was not a fast process, it was very slow, reconsidering almost each belief, and almost each belief was wrong. And what I started to think was if we're the people that are pushing to save the environment, save nature, to combat climate change, and we're confused about some of the solutions, you know, what if we're actually causing more damage than we're doing repair? What if we're pushing for the wrong solution? So I started to question that quite a lot. And then the second red flag was trying to raise it in some of these groups and just being told, no, we don't talk about that. Why are you bringing that up? Who is telling you to bring that up? And that's where I started to think, hold on, this doesn't feel right. I'd grown up with a lot of different religions, having different religions pushed on me, which I'd completely rejected. Again, a slow process of thinking and discovering for myself. And it felt very similar. It felt like, why am I in this constricted box where we can't even discuss? Maybe I'm wrong, but how do I know if I'm wrong if we can't discuss it? And that was a big red flag for me. And that was in every activist organization that was in, every single one, even the groups that uh were not environmental groups. I was in human rights organizations, I was doing all kinds of stuff. Yeah. So I ended up stepping away from a lot of those movements because I felt like it wasn't just nuclear, there were other things where we would discuss um solutions and people would be against it. So one other thing was I was writing for a kind of hippie green parenting magazine. And I would write stuff about vaccines and I would get a lot of backlash from people saying, Why are you promoting vaccines? Who's paying you to promote vaccines? It was the same thing again where I think this is worrying me because I feel like we should have we should be able to have a discussion where I can talk about data, really, is what I was doing.

James Hogson: 4:42

Now you mentioned some really interesting parts there, particularly talking about the the association with nuclear weapons. That is the first thing that comes to mind. Just the belief that nuclear is bad. What do you think is the foundation of that belief that it that nuclear energy is a negative?

Zion Lights: 4:58

It's complicated and it is slightly different for different people. A lot of people do hold that fear of if you can if you have the materials for civil nuclear, then you can make weapons, which actually, you know, to some degree, I can I can understand that. I can understand that. But I would say there's quite a lot of countries that have one and not the other. Like South and North Korea, one has a civil nuclear program. South Korea actually has a really good program and they export their reactors and expertise. And then you have North Korea, which has a big weapons program. So actually, it's not necessarily true that you have both, probably because actually it's expensive. So you'll put your money in one bucket and not the other. Not a lot of countries have both. But I understand that it's not about day trades, it's about how you feel. And I think pop culture didn't help. I also grew up watching a lot of stuff, uh, a lot of media reading books as well, where it's always a post-nuclear apocalypse, even if they don't go into the detail of what happened and why. And so in my head, I'd still think, oh, that's what happens when you have a nuclear power station. And sometimes they did explicitly say that was why things happen, because it's a very scary story. And stories are what drive us, really. It's what we believe stories over data, absolutely. And, you know, I grew up watching The Simpsons. Who's the worst person in The Simpsons? It's the guy that runs a nuclear plant. Now, let me tell you something. I have in recent years met people that work at nuclear plants and they're the loveliest people, honestly. And they're doing it because they care about climate change, they're doing it because they want good jobs. These are unionized jobs, they want to put food on the table for their families, they want to study more. There's a lot of potential for kind of moving up. They're really nice people. And I thought that was funny because even after I'd changed my mind, I still had an idea that like they were demonized, industry was demonized. I didn't like it when people say, You're just saying that because you work for industry. I say, No, I have no association. And started saying, actually, you know what? It would be okay if I don't, I still don't. I don't work for industry, but it would be okay if I did. Why are we demonizing them? These are not the bad guys.

James Hogson: 6:51

And you said as well that potentially advocating for a purely renewables-based energy system, could potentially do more harm than good. Do you believe that it is doing more harm than good, or it's just a risk?

Zion Lights: 7:04

Absolutely. I think there are examples that show where it's done more harm than good. And I'll give Germany as an example in a minute. But I think it's, you know, there's not one solution. So I don't say now, oh, we should just have nuclear. I've never said that. The scientific consensus, if people want to actually look at what the evidence says, it's in the IPCC Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change Warming Report, 1.5 warming report, came out in 2018. There's various iterations where they update the data, but it has a section on mitigation. So it basically crenches the numbers. Here's how what we need to do to decarbonize. And it has carbon capture in there, which some people don't like, but I accept that because it's in there. And it has nuclear and renewable scenarios, it has four different scenarios with different amounts of each. But there's quite a lot of nuclear in there. And actually, that was what changed my mind mainly because I was using that report when I was in Extinction Rebellion, giving a lot of talks, giving news interviews, saying, we need to listen to the science, look at this report. It's telling us all these things are going to happen if we don't act on climate change. And then I actually read through that report. It's very data heavy, so I appreciate most people wouldn't read it. And I got to the mitigation section and I went, wait a minute, this says we can't just do it with renewables. Yeah. And I've spent my entire life saying we can just do this with renewables. It was another big kind of shock. And but that was the first time I came across that information anywhere. And it was before people were really writing or talking about it. And I started writing and talking about it. I remember I wrote an article for open democracy. It's what their first kind of pro, if you like, nuclear article. I was just outlining the science, and they said, the scientific consensus says we need nuclear. We're going to triple check that. And I had two different people check it. And I sent them the link and they said, Yeah, we'll keep that in because it's true. And credit to them for going with the data there. But it was that controversial even to say it just a few years ago. And I think it's become much more common knowledge now. But yeah, if all the scenarios are saying we need something to back up renewables, then we have to accept that's either fossil fuels or it's nuclear. Like we can't be against both. That's where I landed with it. And the more I looked into nuclear, the more I realized it doesn't have the problems fossil fuels has. It just doesn't. In terms of pollution, obviously, air pollution, in terms of risk to people, you know, you think of things like the coal fires that go on, gas explosions. Like actually, it's much more dangerous. And if there's data on this, if you go to our world in data, they have a chart, a really good chart, that breaks down the number of deaths per source of energy. I know it sounds really morbid, but at the top are all the fossil fuels, and coal is the worst. Coal is the very worst, which most people know, but if you look at it, you'll actually see nuclear is down there with solar and wind. And that's how safe it is. But we don't think that. We think, or Simpsons or something scary that I saw that makes me believe that it's much more dangerous.

James Hogson: 9:43

You know, even if we could get renewables to where it needs to be to meet all of our energy needs. So there's just some natural limits that occur.

Zion Lights: 9:51

Yeah, there's both. And there's also regulatory problems where we have, and you've probably seen this in the news, where we actually have the capacity built and it's not connected to the grid, and that's because it needs its own grid. So you need to, you're not just putting up wind farms, turbines, and solar panels. You have to have the poles and wires as well. The good thing about nuclear is it can use existing grid, it can use the coal grid. So that actually, in a way, makes it easier. Not saying there aren't still things that slow it down, there are. But with renewables, you have to make sure all that's in place. So if you look in Germany at the moment, there's people protesting those wires and poles going up in their areas. They don't want them. And they're now looking at a more expensive solution of trying to put them underground. But it's just a massive delay. So that is an issue, but that's not something we can we can't overcome. I just think probably we need to approach it differently, where you kind of speak to people before you get permission before you go and try and put that in the area because it just ends up backfiring otherwise. So there's that. But that in terms of the technology, there is battery storage, and we can back up um wind and solar power for a few hours. We just can't do it for a long period. We can't do it for days. And that's basically it, that's the issue. So you could build a lot of batteries and you could then it would last, you can collect the energy and store it for longer, but you'd need a lot of batteries and they're very mineral intensive, very highly intensive, actually. If you care about environmental things, actually, that should be something that you look into and go, well, that's a bit of a problem. And then the panels and the turbines last around 25 years. So they need replacing later down the line. I'm not saying don't build them. We need them as well, but don't just rely on those. And I think this is a the problem, is that we with Next Zero Goals, we became very pushy about renewables. And I think what we should have been pushy about was clean energy because not all renewables are created equally. Like if you have hydropower, that's really reliable. You don't need storage for that. But not everywhere has high capacity for hydropowers. Some countries do, some countries have a lot on the Sweden. We don't, right? So you can have geothermal, also has some limitations, also has some things that you have to put in place to be able to build that. If you look at the easier thing, if you don't have a lot of hydropower, it is nuclear. If you want clean energy, if you want clean energy, if you want something, just want something cheap, yeah, coal is cheap, but it's highly costly to the environment and our welfare and our health. And so you can look at what France did, where they just built over 50 reactors back in the 80s. Like they had an oil crisis and they kind of said, we need to be more energy independent, we need security. They built all these reactors, they've never had any meltdown issues, and most of their grid, I think it's about 70% now, but at one point it was more like 80% was decarbonised. They did this before we were worrying about climate change, and you just think we could have all done that. And the reason we didn't actually was because the people like me who should have been promoting the solutions were uh fighting against it, which I think is sad. But getting on to Germany, this is a really good case study where again I had to change my mind because when Germany put a lot of money, they literally put trillions of euros into building wind and solar, I thought, brilliant, they're finally going to prove what I've been saying for years that it can be done. You can run a whole country on this. And that is different. You can run a small area on it, absolutely, you can have panels on your house, that works. But running an entire grid, that's more complicated. And they put lots of money into it and they basically didn't manage it. And I think the mistake they made was it's called Energy Winder, the energy transition. They phased out coal, they phased out nuclear, and then they tried to just build wind and solar. And as we will remember from a few years ago, they had to then backtrack on coal, reopen the mothboard coal packs because it's easier to do. With the nuclear ones, they've been decommissioned. Some towers had been blown up. It's too late now. All those people lost their jobs, they've gone to other areas where they can work in that industry. But um they had to then burn lignite coal, which is the dirtiest coal, and they had to bulldoze villages to get it. And I remember that photo of the activists standing in front of this huge machinery protesting it, which I understand, but I also think those activists probably also protested the nuclear plants. The question is, where are you going to get your energy from? And this is what I'm saying when I talk about energy. Like energy supports everything that we do. We are rich because we have access to reliable energy. You probably think, well, I have lighting, heating, yeah, I appreciate those things. It's more than that. If you walk outside after dark, you're not walking in the pitch black, right? Because we have systems where there's light, there's lighting in the streets. If you need to keep food cold and you don't want food poisoning, you have refrigeration. If you're in a hospital and you need to keep medication cold, because if it gets to a certain temperature, this is the case for some medications and vaccines, you won't be able to use anymore, it won't be worthless. You have that, you have those, and we have a backup system, they have generators so that if our grid fails, the hospitals won't. That's how lucky we are. We have access to energy. The problem is that millions of people still don't. And I worked with NGOs, I've worked with organizations who have said we don't want them burning coal. Okay, fair enough. Yep, I've been at the cops, that's what they say. Don't burn the coal. Switch to gas at least as an intermittent. But ultimately they'll say, why don't you just build more wind and solar? And I don't think that's right because we didn't develop the way we developed into an industrialization with just wind and solar, with just intermittent power. We just didn't. We burned a lot of fossil fuels and we cause the problems. And now we tell other countries we don't want you to do that. And I think that's wrong because poverty is energy poverty, and that's people need lifting up out of it, and they can't do it if we're blocking. When I was at COP26 a few years ago in Glasgow, there was a bit of an argument about it because India basically said we don't want to sign this document saying we have to phase out by this year. We're growing, we're trying to get out of poverty, you know, lift more people out of poverty. And you had Western nations saying we think you should be pressuring them, you should sign it, and they came away and said they wouldn't. And that was in, I remember that was in the news and it was reported very negatively about India. And I disagree, I think it's more complicated than that.

James Hogson: 15:44

There's so much in there. I'm interested to know if we enable nuclear to be part of the energy mix, both in the developed world, but also the countries that are developing their energy capacity, what do you see as the key differences or the core differences if we were to try to enforce a purely renewable? I know you've mentioned it's probably not even possible at the moment, but if it were were it possible in terms of the route to net zero and also encouraging other nations to adopt a clean energy mix, what does nuclear enable us to do for energy not just covering our energy needs, but the abundance that we're likely to need in the future, that perhaps are purely either staying as we are or going to a purely renewable mix wouldn't allow?

Zion Lights: 16:25

So we have nuclear in our net zero goals in Britain. Not all countries do. Australia has a ban on civil nuclear, Germany phased out nuclear. Not all countries have this progressive view that we need all the clean energy. And I've seen Ed Miliband make some really good kind of videos explaining why we have the new, like going and meeting people at the industry and showing them this is how it works. And often when you build a reactor somewhere, often because it requires water, it's usually in like a seaside town, something like that. And often those areas really need that economic boost and it needs the jobs. So people in those areas, if you look at the polls, actually, they're the most supportive of the technology. So it's quite easy in terms of we know we need it, we're building it. But are we building enough? Absolutely not. And that's because we have problems in the UK that we have had so many delays with how we build nuclear. And that leads people to think, oh, this is a really problematic technology, like it's too slow. But I think it's more we struggle with large infrastructure projects in general. Like you can say the same thing about HS2, right? And that's regulatory issues and a lot of other stuff going on that really needs fixing because, in the same way that if you don't build a nuclear power plant, you're just depending more on fossil fuels, imported fossil fuels, creating carbon emissions. If you don't build the rails, railway, then people just stay in the cars, right? So it's a similar thing that actually we know what the solutions are. That's not a mystery. The consensus is very clear on what we need to do. It's getting there. That is a problem that we have in Britain. I know there's a there's a big surge in a EB alliance now, people fighting back and trying to fix some of these regulatory problems and so on. So that's good. But at the moment, it's just not enough. And we have the same issue with building wind and solar. We have people protesting. Solar farms have seen down south, there's quite a bit of that. If people don't consent to it on their land where they live, they're just not going to get built. So there needs to be a lot more work with communities, I think, in explaining what this technology is. In my area, we had 5G protests. So again, it's not just about energy. We had protests against the masts going up here because people had read something online. I think it was something to do with they caused like radiation in your brain. I don't know the details of that, but I know that there were a lot of people who turned up at council meetings protesting, building these masts, which are harmless. But anyway, it means that internet's slower because they didn't get built. But uh, it's the same thing. And I think actually, in a way, it's people are so disconnected from the technology that we depend on and they don't understand. That's why you get the activists protest. I mean, I've seen activists protesting wind, right? They don't what like wind, they think the turbines are ugly or whatever, they've got their reasons, they hurt birds, you know, all this stuff they worry about, they don't like coal and they don't like nuclear. And I've literally said to them, what is left? What's left? What how do you think we're going to power our livestils? And what and actually, I've had this conversation many times, and what they'll say is, we don't need to be able to watch TV in the middle of the night, Zion. Someone said that to me. And I said, It's not about being able to watch TV in the night, it's about keeping your food cold and keeping your house warm. It's such a strange conversation because I realize I just have a very different perspective to the activists on this. Probably because my parents grew up in rural poverty in India where they, you know, they don't have regular access to electricity. And I saw what that energy poverty is, not my experience growing up, my parents' experience before they moved here, and I have more of an appreciation for it, and therefore look at the systems where we need to build it. And I think we're now protesting with these things. So I would say in Britain that's the biggest issue. There's still a lot of pushback. And because of previous pushback, there's a lot of rules in place. For example, with nuclear regulations is really uh uh over the top things that slow it down, they just slow it down. You know, we've got the French EPR, the best way to build it is just to do exactly what France. Take the model like a Lego model and just repeat. And it means that it gets faster as well because the engineers get good at it and they go on to the next one. So the idea is after Hinkley, then size well would be quick to build and it would all be very efficient. In theory, that's a standardization model. There's actually papers on this that show that it's worked. In South Korea, it's worked. In Japan, it's worked. They literally build these reactors in a few years. Does lead you to question why Hinckley has taken over a decade, and it is because we make design changes. So when we import the EPR, we change the design to fit our regulations, which actually, if you think about it, is a less safe thing to do because we know this works as it is. Why are we changing? So just stuff like the concrete has to be this much thicker, or the nails have to be this brand nails, and all of that slows it all down. And it happens again, it happens across all industries. But I think if you're really serious about slowing climate change and if you care about the environment, then these things have to go. You have to be a bigger picture about it. These things, these issues that are stalling us have to go. We need the rail networks because we need to get more people out of cars. And it's not fair to just tell them to get out of cars when there's no other option. And we need to build the power plants, and we can convert old coal stations into nuclear power plants, but there's all the paperwork to get through. And those are the things that are actually holding us back that don't happen in countries like South Korea and Japan, which is where they they build them very quickly and efficiently.

James Hogson: 21:29

But yeah, coming back to that point on efficiency, is there any research or at the moment which sort of says if we did embrace a broader clean energy mix, how quickly could we get to net zero?

Zion Lights: 21:39

I haven't seen research on it. It's more of a theory, I think, in that look, France went from having a heavy fossil fuel grid in the 70s and 80s. They had an oil crisis. They said, How are we gonna get out of this? What can we build? They do use some hydropower, but they couldn't increase that. What can we build that's going to give us energy security, bring us money in, strengthen our economy, all of that? And the Prime Minister at the time, Pia Mesmer, came up with what we now call the Mesma plan. He said, We're gonna build 100 reactors. They didn't build that many, they built, I think it was something like 58. But we're gonna do it and we're gonna do it in a decade. And they did it in a decade. I don't know that sounds crazy, but they did it in 10 years. That now that data is very solid. You can look at charts all over the internet showing you in 10 years, they decarbonized their grid so that they were 80% clean energy only. And since then they've built a lot more renewables, and they still have one of the cleanest grids in Europe. So if we did this, in theory, with the technology, and actually I'd say a lot of the things with the technology have got better, you could do it in less than 10 years. The issue is all of those things that I just said that are just very human issues, where you just think, where is your sense of urgency? Almost tear up the rule book and start again. Just copy a model that works, copy France's or copy South Korea's. They're safe, they've been running these reactors for decades with no issues. We know the technology works. Just build it. And you've actually got communities crying out for this. So I went down to Wilver and interviewed some of the people there because they decommissioned the power plant there. And there was a lot of discussion in the previous government, Boris Johnson promising that they were going to get a new reactor, which didn't happen. And I was talking to the people in the communities there, and they were so sad because they said that was their main industry. They had that and they had a, I think it was the aluminium factory, which had also shut down. And they said, this is what keeps our young people here. And now that it the decommissioning is almost coming to an end, there's no jobs left. And I spoke to people who started out there as cleaners who got trained and got to actually work in the power plant, and they said, I couldn't believe that I was able to do this. And I there were younger people who said, I saw all my family working at the power plant. I couldn't wait. They had like regular dances, a lot of sort of community stuff, a lot of opportunity. And there's cross-party support in Wales, where they actually, all of the major parties wrote a letter to the government, UK government at the time, saying, We want a reactor here because that area is going to be, they're really going to suffer now without having any industry there. So to me, that's a no-brainer. Like you don't have to cite these things where there's opposition. There's places that are ready to go. You've got people who've already been trained there, who are quite happy to help the younger generation. You've got a lot of young people who don't want to leave Wales that I spoke to, who'd say, I'm a Welsh speaker, I want to stay here, but instead I've got to go to London. Quite a lot of them do end up doing that. And to me, that's really it's really positive, actually, because you've got all these people who are ready to knuckle down and do the work, and they all have the same reasons. Yes, jobs, jobs is one of the main reasons, but they also care about the environment. Yeah. And they haven't believed, because they've grown up surrounded by it, they haven't believed the lies and the myths and the scary stories. So they don't have that barrier in the same way that they don't in South Korea and Japan. They don't have the kind of environmentalist anti-nuclear faction. That's very much a Western thing. Oh, that's quite interesting. Yeah, and they so they haven't had the regulatory delays, they haven't had the public protests, they just haven't had the issues, China as well, they just haven't had the issues that we've had, and they're building more reactors than anyone. We're so slow and far behind, actually. In Hinkley will come online soon, and that will make a big difference. And it will ease up bills. It will, once these reactors come online, they're very powerful, but it's just not enough. It's just not enough for our needs. And even alongside the wind and solar we're building, it's just not enough. I tend to say, look at it this way, because I know people will say, why don't we just not have the AI data centers? Okay, fine, you could argue that. But what if there's a technology around the corner that is a life-saving technology and we can't build it because we didn't create the capacity to power it? And that has happened in history. No one talks about it, but it happened with at CERN with the large Hadron Collider when we had the energy crisis after Russia invaded Ukraine. They had to shut that down. And you literally had these physicists saying this was not designed to be shut down for a prolonged period. We don't know if it will switch back on again. And this was decades of work of scientific, global scientific collaboration to build the world's strongest, most powerful particle accelerator powered by mostly nuclear from Switzerland and France, where it's on the border. And because of the energy crisis and those countries having to export more to other countries, they had to shut it down. And I just thought, isn't that a shame? That was not headline news. It was not something most people cared about. I appreciate they're worrying more about keeping the lights on. But that was sad to me because I think that's what makes us human. That scientific discovery and exploration, we should never just push that aside. And to me, those are the things that keep us. That's why we're here. That's what we're trying to find these things out that we've never found out before. And we have had lots of discoveries out of the hadrancolida. But if we don't appreciate it, then we'll lose. We'll lose these technologies. And they are always very energy intensive. We might not like that, but we are a very energy-intensive species. We just are. We require it to stay alive, right? We require it to stay alive. You live in a very cold or very hot country, you require it to stay alive. And that's aside from other things that we use, like cooking food. We use energy for that. We require it. We can do it without, but it's much harder. And there are millions of people who do without. They just burn charcoal or wood on a little stove. That's what my relatives do in the Punjab in India. And I've seen it, and I've seen them coughing, and I've seen the statistics for how many women and girls there get respiratory issues because they're coughing over these little stoves. We shouldn't want to live like that.

James Hogson: 27:42

Yeah. Energy touches every element of our lives, and we do take it for granted. It's what we don't realize, it's the privilege we don't realise that we have in some areas of our life. And directly, as you say, through how we live, but also through the progress and innovation and discoveries that it powers. Can we talk a little bit about the status of the technology? In particular, looking at some of the long-promised breakthroughs in nuclear, fusion is always just around the corner or 20 years away, depending on who you believe. And also there's been you know reports of of small modular reactors being something that could accelerate the transition. How realistic are these potential progressions in technology?

Zion Lights: 28:24

You know, I think it's interesting with fusion because people always say to me, once we have fusion, all our problems are solved. And I'll say, What can fusion do that fission can't? Like fission can already do that. We just need to build the things. And yeah, fusion's more powerful, but it's also more expensive and more difficult to build even once we have it. So it's still kicking the can down the road. Like we'll be able to solve this one day with this technology. I think it would be great once we have fusion. I do. I also think there will be lots of barriers to slow it down, not to be too pessimistic, but I think it will probably have the same issues that fission has had. So there's that. And SMR, now SMR's an interesting small modular reactors are interesting because what they're trying to do is solve all the problems that I've said with nuclear being slowed down because of all of these things. And I don't one thing I didn't mention was upfront cost. It's not more expensive to build them in the long run because they last over 60 years. The power plants do, but there's a large upfront cost. And a lot of governments don't want to put that up, especially when they might not even see this come online in their lifetimes. They're not going to be able to take credit for it. So that's been a long issue. So what there's basically a race happening around the world with all these different companies trying to build the best reactor, and what they're trying to do is make it smaller, make it compact, something almost like you could just print that in a factory, and then it can go and be plonked down in that place. So it saves all of the things that are slowing us down at the moment, is the idea. But it also needs to be affordable, it needs to be cheap. So they're competing in this space to try and build the best reactor and then hopefully not only build it at home, but be able to export it to other countries. So there's a lot of that going on at the moment. I'm sure people have seen in the UK, we've committed to Rob's Royce. There are lots, still lots of other companies, even here, trying to build their own technology. You've got other countries, people trying to build thorium reactors. That's another really good technology because thorum is very abundant in the environment. And yeah, in theory, it's much better environmentally. But we can't build it yet. We actually, China has said very recently announced that they have been able to produce the first working thorium reactor, but we haven't seen the blueprints yet. So no one can actually look at it and verify that's true. And even if it is, it doesn't mean they'll share that technology with us. Because if they can do that, they're going to be very energy rich and abundant very quickly because it is just so better. In theory, it's better. So there's a lot of stuff being promised. Now don't tend to champion SMRs. It's not that I don't agree with advanced tech. I'm all for building fusion, I'm for for developing fusion, for building scientific instruments. I'm all for SMRs, advanced nuclear. I'm all for desalination plants. Why not build them? Yes, they're energy intense, but it's better than having people starve from water scarcity, right, in those areas where they're needed. So I'm all for that. But because they're not online yet, I'm very much more in line with the scientific consensus, which is looking at the current. I don't want to make a prediction and say, hey, we could actually just do this because they're not online yet. Once they've built them and they've cited them and have public approval to do and they're supplying electricity into the grid, then I would expect there to be new reports anyway, where they will look at, okay, how does this fit into the solution? How many do we need? But almost it's more on par with wind and solar because you don't get as much power out of them. Of course, that's the idea, they're smaller. So I'm actually very much for the old reactors, just because we know they work. Um, they're very powerful, they do last for a long time. If you care about environmental footprint, they last for over 60 years. That's a long time for a set amount of resources that isn't then later repeated. And even stuff like you can recycle the fuel. We don't do it here in Britain, but you know, we send it to France and they recycle our fuel and reuse it. Things like that I'm absolutely full because it lowers the environmental footprint by quite a lot. But yeah, we'll see what happens with all you never know. In the next 10 years, there might be major advances, even in fusion, and that would be amazing. But I still think it will have barriers to implementation.

James Hogson: 32:18

The other major concern that exists that we probably haven't touched on yet is around the waste from these plants. What's your view on the safest way dealing with that issue that exists?

Zion Lights: 32:31

Yeah, so waste was actually one of the major reasons that I was against technology. It wasn't so much the kind of weapons fear. I didn't grow up in a time when that was societal fear. For me, it was the waste. But I did admittedly picture waste as that kind of Simpsons yellow barrel with the goopy green acidic liquid, and I'm a spraying it everywhere. And that that was what informed my understanding of waste. So when I went away and looked at it, again, everything that I believed was wrong. It's not even liquid, it's it comes out as these solid metal rods, which they encase in several layers to protect everyone from the radiation, and they get stored in these big casks. It's actually really boring. And I've been to visit some of these casks at size. Well, I had to, it's not easy to do, you have to clear security and all this stuff to go and have a look at them. But you then go into this room, very highly secure room, and they have these huge casks, and you just think this is really boring. Like, who thinks? And honestly, I used to believe, you know, you might get terrorists wheeling these off and using who thinks you could possibly do that. They, if you go to YouTube and you put in nuclear cask test, there are tests from in the 70s when they produced these casks for storing the long-term waste. And they literally fly planes, small planes and missiles into them, not very environmentally friendly, but they were testing the casks. They don't even dent. And when Fukushima happened, they had casks on site. They don't even fall over. No one can do anything with them, they're boring. So that's high-level waste. So there's only a really small amount of that, but because it is radioactive, it's shielded in these big casks so that you can go up and hug it. And I've done that, you can go up and hug it and touch it and whatever, you're completely shielded. You can take a gaiga canter and you can check for yourself. You get more radiation from sleeping next to someone at night because everything is naturally radioactive. And most what I think what people don't realize is how little waste there is. Most waste is low-level waste, and it's actually produced, it's not just produced by nuclear power plants, it's produced by nuclear medicine. So you think radiotherapy, anything that's happening in nuclear medicine, all the gloves, the lab coats, everything that they they use, implements, have to go into a specific box for depth for dealing with low-level waste. So we're very good at doing that. We never have any issues with it. Most people don't even realize that's happening at all hospitals with where they do nuclear medicine, which saves many lives. Yeah, so it's just not, you know, once I started realizing these things, I it became more kind of normal to me rather than a scary story. We're very good at dealing with the waste, and we haven't had issues with the waste. And I don't know where I heard all these stories from when I was in the these environmental groups where they'd say they found this leaking. How can it leak when it's a solid cask and layers? There's some misinformation going around still about these casks. Now, the long-term solution, the consensus is, put them back underground at a depth from which you took the material originally. Some countries are more progressive than others, and they're doing this. So they tried to do it in the US years ago and there were major protests and they gave up. But actually, if you think about it, it's more dangerous to protest it because you're just leaving these casks out. Now they can stay there for our lifetimes, they're fine. I'm talking tens of thousands of years down the line. Are they still just going to be sitting there? Does anything last tens of thousands of years? You know, that's what we're thinking when we're thinking what's a long-term solution.

James Hogson: 35:48

I mean, this has all been fascinating, Zion, but I'm sure that many of our listeners may still be skeptical after all of this. So a couple of quick questions to close. Have you seen public perception changing since your time campaigning in this area? And what what would you say, or what resource would you point any listeners to who's still either on the fence or sceptical about this transition?

Zion Lights: 36:15

I have seen a lot of change. I actually wrote an article about five years ago about how we need to stop demonising the nuclear industry. So I remember meeting a nuclear worker, and she said she literally went on a date, and when she told this guy where she worked, he basically walked out. She was so upset about it as a young person. And it really drove home to me, like, oh, people are actually reacting this way in real life. And thinking about it, I know that because I know how the activists that I spent time with would react to some of these people. And I think I think we need to build bridges and not demonize people for trying to put food on the table or contribute in some way to our climate goals. That's not going to change some people's minds. Some people do just have an innate fear. And what I would say is for me, I was very afraid. I was terrified of waste. I was very scared about the technology in general. I didn't change my mind because I cared about nuclear technology, I'll be honest. I changed my mind because I cared about alleviating energy poverty, I care about reducing air pollution, and I care about environmental footprint. And nuclear does have the lowest land footprint of all energy sources, and that's because it doesn't use a lot of fuel and it lasts a very long time. So once you build it, you get a lot back from that. So those are the reasons I changed my mind. But the main reason was energy poverty. And in terms of resources, if I'm allowed, I'm going to say I've written a book, Energy's Life, and it's nonfiction, but I've written it as narrative nonfiction because what I realized was there was a lot of technical books that I could send your way and say, go and read this book on nuclear technology. I don't think that really changes people's minds when they have deep-seated worries and fears. So what I've tried to do is include the data, things that I've talked about, the charts are in there, you can go and look up the sources, they're all in the back. But consider the arguments for energy scarcity versus energy abundance and why scarcity essentially, in a way, is idolizing poverty. And we did that in the environmental movement. We did that a lot, this idea of naturalistic fallacy. If it's natural, it's better. We live on the land, it's better. I have family that live on the land in the rural Punjab and they don't want to live there anymore. That's why my parents left. They didn't want to give up their culture and the entire family, and family is very important in Indian culture, and their language and their home, but they left because they didn't want to live in scarcity anymore. They didn't want to live somewhere where you can't get access to medication when you're sick because the nearest hospital is four hours away and there's no roads and you don't own a car because you're poor. They don't want to live in areas where you don't have air conditioning in 40 degree heat in the summer, where there are snakes that might bite you, there are dogs that buy you in. These are actually really high rates of these incidences in India and other countries. Not because you can't be treated, you can be treated for that. You have anti-venom. But how are you going to get that when you have no development, when you have no access? And they have tried actually since they left to get people to move into these villages and be teachers and be doctors. And those people don't want to live there because they don't want it to be pitch black at night and not have lighting when there are dogs running around. That is what I'm talking about when I talk about energy. It's not really nuclear, but nuclear comes into it because it is one of our cleanest, most abundant energy sources if we want to wean off fossil fuels. And I've spent my life fighting fossil fuels. I was arrested twice a decade before Greta Thunberg came on the scene, protesting coal and tar sands. I have the receipts from this movement, but I think we made a mistake in fighting against one of the things that we actually need to help solve climate change, to drastically reduce air pollution and especially help other countries to lift themselves out of poverty. And actually, if you look at countries like India and Africa, they're looking at continents like Africa, they're looking at trying to build nuclear reactors. India actually started a program in the 70s. They want the technology, they just they can't afford it, they don't have the infrastructure, they don't have the expertise, but they want it because they know if we really don't want coal anymore because it's making our residents sick, and you do See that you can see actually see that there where they have the cold-fired power stations, and you can look at the parameter of how poorly the residents get. Actually, that's the way to go. And they haven't had the dogma and the stigma that we've had in our movement, which almost was born of too much privilege. You know, we protest something that's so essential to our everyday life, but just don't recognize and appreciate it. And I'm just trying to do my small bit to try and change that. I think if you read the book, that's the best thing I can say that might help you change your mind, it might not. But the data's in there, so it's a question of whether or not you can overcome ideology with data. I know it's very hard to do. I had to do it. I had to do it and go against all my peers, people I'd sat in prison with, people I'd blocked roads with, and say, wait, I think you're wrong because the data says you're wrong, and I care about evidence-based solutions that are actually going to get us where we need to be rather than things that just make me feel good.

James Hogson: 41:03

And thank you for bringing us back to the book. Energy is Life is available to pre-order now, and it's going to be published in February 26th here in the UK. I'm sure it's available worldwide as well. Xion, thank you so much for sharing today. It's a very powerful message. Before we go, we have our standard closing question. I feel as though we've covered this in detail over the course of the interview, but is there anything else would you've changed your mind on recently?

Zion Lights: 41:28

Actually, I changed my mind about GMOs, which isn't really the right genetically modified organisms. It's more of an activist phrase. If you look at it scientifically, it's gene editing. And the more I learned about gene editing, and again, something we protest and we're very against, things like golden rice that can help solve blindness and save lives. You just think we should be supporting this technology. We should be rolling it out. More countries need access to genetically modified crops that will help to, yeah, to reduce health issues within the population. Again, we used to say, oh, they just need access to better food and blah, blah, blah. It hasn't happened. It's just not that easy to solve some of these problems without these technologies. Um, so I have changed my mind on that and I'm now quite a vocal advocate for gene editing technologies for that purpose.

James Hogson: 42:16

I feel like there's a whole nother book and hopefully another podcast interview in that subject. So, Xeon Lights, thank you so much for joining us on Humanism Now.

Humanise Live: 42:24

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