⚛️ Our fission-powered future: My chat (+transcript) with nuclear scientist and author Tim Gregory

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. It's a startling statistic that the US built more nuclear reactors in the five years leading up to Three Mile Island than it has built since. And similarly on this side of the Atlantic, Europe built more nuclear reactors in the five years leading up to Chernobyl than it has built since, which is just astounding, especially given that nobody died in Three Mile Island and nobody was even exposed to anything beyond the background radiation as a result of that nuclear accident.

Chernobyl, of course, was far more consequential and far more serious than Three Mile Island. 30-odd people died in the immediate aftermath, mostly people who were working at the power station and the first responders, famously the firefighters who were exposed to massive amounts of radiation, and probably a couple of hundred people died in the affected population from thyroid cancer. It was people who were children and adolescents at the time of the accident.

So although every death from Chernobyl was a tragedy because it was avoidable, they're not in proportion to the mythic reputation of the night in question. It certainly wasn't reason to effectively end nuclear power expansion in Europe because of course we had to get that power from somewhere, and it mainly came from fossil fuels, which are not just a little bit more deadly than nuclear power, they’re orders of magnitude more deadly than nuclear power. When you add up all of the deaths from nuclear power and compare those deaths to the amount of electricity that we harvest from nuclear power, it's actually as safe as wind and solar, whereas fossil fuels kill hundreds or thousands of times more people per unit of power. To answer your question, it's complicated and there are many answers, but the main two were Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

I wonder how things might have unfolded if those events hadn’t happened or if society had responded proportionally to the actual damage. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are portrayed in documentaries and on TV as far deadlier than they really were, and they still loom large in the public imagination in a really unhelpful way.

You see it online, actually, quite a lot about the predicted death toll from Chernobyl, because, of course, there's no way of saying exactly which cases of cancer were caused by Chernobyl and which ones would've happened anyway. Sometimes you see estimates that are up in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl. They are always based on a flawed scientific hypothesis called the linear no-threshold model that I go into in quite some detail in chapter eight of my book, which is all about the human health effects of exposure to radiation. This model is very contested in the literature. It's one of the most controversial areas of medical science, actually, the effects of radiation on the human body, and all of these massive numbers you see of the death toll from Chernobyl, they're all based on this really kind of clunky, flawed, contentious hypothesis. My reading of the literature is that there's very, very little physical evidence to support this particular hypothesis, but people take it and run. I don’t know if it would be too far to accuse people of pushing a certain idea of Chernobyl, but it almost certainly vastly, vastly overestimates the effects.

I think a large part of the reason of why this had such a massive impact on the public and politicians is this lingering sense of radiophobia that completely blight society. We've all seen it in the movies, in TV shows, even in music and computer games — radiation is constantly used as a tool to invoke fear and mistrust. It's this invisible, centerless, silent specter that's kind of there in the background: It means birth defects, it means cancers, it means ill health. We've all kind of grown up in this culture where the motif of radiation is bad news, it's dangerous, and that inevitably gets tied to people's sense of nuclear power. So when you get something like Three Mile Island, society's imagination and its preconceptions of radiation, it's just like a dry haystack waiting for a flint spark to land on it, and up it goes in flames and people's imaginations run away with them.

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. There's this amazing statistic that if you live within a couple of miles of a nuclear power station, the extra amount of radiation you're exposed to annually is about the same as eating a banana. Bananas are slightly radioactive because of the slight amount of potassium-40 that they naturally contain. Even in the wake of these nuclear accidents like Chernobyl, and more recently Fukushima, the amount of radiation that the public was exposed to barely registers and, in fact, is less than the background radiation in lots of places on the earth.

Motivators for a revival (7:20)

We have no idea what emerging technologies are on the horizon that will also require massive amounts of power, and that's exactly where nuclear can shine.

You just suddenly reminded me of a story of when I was in college in the late 1980s, taking a class on the nuclear fuel cycle. You know it was an easy class because there was an ampersand in it. “Nuclear fuel cycle” would've been difficult. “Nuclear fuel cycle & the environment,” you knew it was not a difficult class.

The man who taught it was a nuclear scientist and, at one point, he said that he would have no problem having a nuclear reactor in his backyard. This was post-Three Mile Island, post-Chernobyl, and the reaction among the students — they were just astounded that he would be willing to have this unbelievably dangerous facility in his backyard.

We have this fear of nuclear power, and there's sort of an economic component, but now we're seeing what appears to be a nuclear renaissance. I don't think it's driven by fear of climate change, I think it's driven A) by fear that if you are afraid of climate change, just solar and wind aren't going to get you to where you want to be; and then B) we seem like we're going to need a lot of clean energy for all these AI data centers. So it really does seem to be a perfect storm after a half-century.

And who knows what next. When I started writing Going Nuclear, the AI story hadn't broken yet, and so all of the electricity projections for our future demand, which, they range from doubling to tripling, we're going to need a lot of carbon-free electricity if we've got any hope of electrifying society whilst getting rid of fossil fuels. All of those estimates were underestimates because nobody saw AI coming.

It's been very, very interesting just in the last six, 12 months seeing Big Tech in North America moving first on this. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have all either invested or actually placed orders for small modular reactors specifically to power their AI data centers. In some ways, they've kind of led the charge on this. They've moved faster than most nation states, although it is encouraging, actually, here in the UK, just a couple of weeks ago, the government announced that our new nuclear power station is definitely going ahead down in Sizewell in Suffolk in the south of England. That's a 3.2 gigawatt nuclear reactor, it's absolutely massive. But it's been really, really encouraging to see Big Tech in the private sector in North America take the situation into their own hands. If anyone's real about electricity demands and how reliable you need it, it's Big Tech with these data centers.

I always think, go back five, 10 years, talk of AI was only on the niche subreddits and techie podcasts where people were talking about it. It broke into the mainstream all of a sudden. Who knows what is going to happen in the next five or 10 years. We have no idea what emerging technologies are on the horizon that will also require massive amounts of power, and that's exactly where nuclear can shine.

In the US, at least, I don’t think decarbonization alone is enough to win broad support for nuclear, since a big chunk of the country doesn’t think we actually need to do that. But I think that pairing it with the promise of rapid AI-driven economic growth creates a stronger case.

I tried to appeal to a really broad church in Going Nuclear because I really, really do believe that whether you are completely preoccupied by climate change and environmental issues or you're completely preoccupied by economic growth, and raising living, standards and all of that kind of thing, all the monetary side of things, nuclear is for you because if you solve the energy problem, you solve both problems at once. You solve the economic problem and the environmental problem.

There's this really interesting relationship between GDP per head — which is obviously incredibly important in economic terms — and energy consumption per head, and it's basically a straight line relationship between the two. There are no rich countries that aren't also massive consumers of energy, so if you really, really care about the economy, you should really also be caring about energy consumption and providing energy abundance so people can go out and use that energy to create wealth and prosperity. Again, that's where nuclear comes in. You can use nuclear power to sate that massive energy demand that growing economies require.

This podcast is very pro-wealth and prosperity, but I'll also say, if the nuclear dreams of the ’60s where you had, in this country, what was the former Atomic Energy Commission expecting there to be 1000 nuclear reactors in this country by the year 2000, we're not having this conversation about climate change. It is amazing that what some people view as an existential crisis could have been prevented — by the United States and other western countries, at least — just making a different political decision.

We would be spending all of our time talking about something else, and how nice would that be?

For sure. I'm sure there'd be other existential crises to worry about.

But for sure, we wouldn't be talking about climate change was anywhere near the volume or the sense of urgency as we are now if we would've carried on with the nuclear expansion that really took off in the ’70s and the ’80s. It would be something that would be coming our way in a couple of centuries.

About nuclear waste . . . (12:41)

. . . a 100 percent nuclear-powered life for about 80 years, their nuclear waste would barely fill a wine glass or a coffee cup.

I don't know if you've ever seen the television show For All Mankind?

I haven't. So many people have recommended it to me.

It’s great. It’s an alt-history that looks at what if the Space Race had never stopped. As a result, we had a much more tech-enthusiastic society, which included being much more pro-nuclear.

Anyway, imagine if you are on a plane talking to the person next to you, and the topic of your book comes up, and the person says hey, I like energy, wealth, prosperity, but what are you going to do about the nuclear waste?

That almost exact situation has happened, but on a train rather than an airplane. One of the cool things about uranium is just how much energy you can get from a very small amount of it. If typical person in a highly developed economy, say North America, Europe, something like that, if they produced all of their power over their entire lifetime from nuclear alone, so forget fossil fuels, forget wind and solar, a 100 percent nuclear-powered life for about 80 years, their nuclear waste would barely fill a wine glass or a coffee cup. You need a very small amount of uranium to power somebody's life, and the natural conclusion of that is you get a very small amount of waste for a lifetime of power. So in terms of the numbers, and the amount of nuclear waste, it's just not that much of a problem.

However, I don't want to just try and trivialize it out of existence with some cool pithy statistics and some cool back-of-the-envelopes physics calculations because we still have to do something with the nuclear waste. This stuff is going to be radioactive for the best part of a million years. Thankfully, it's quite an easy argument to make because good old Finland, which is one of the most nuclear nations on the planet as a share of nuclear in its grid, has solved this problem. It has implemented — and it's actually working now — the world's first and currently only geological repository for nuclear waste. Their idea is essentially to bury it in impermeable bedrock and leave it there because, as with all radioactive objects, nuclear waste becomes less radioactive over time. The idea is that, in a million years, Finland's nuclear waste won't be nuclear waste anymore, it will just be waste. A million years sounds like a really long time to our ears, but it's actually —

It does.

It sounds like a long time, but it is the blink of an eye, geologically. So to a geologist, a million years just comes and goes straight away. So it's really not that difficult to keep nuclear waste safe underground on those sorts of timescales. However — and this is the really cool thing, and this is one of the arguments that I make in my book — there are actually technologies that we can use to recycle nuclear waste. It turns out that when you pull uranium out of a reactor, once it's been burned for a couple of years in a reactor, 95 percent of the atoms are still usable. You can still use them to generate nuclear power. So by throwing away nuclear waste when it's been through a nuclear reactor once, we're actually squandering like 95 percent of material that we're throwing away.

The theory is this sort of the technology behind breeder reactors?

That's exactly right, yes.

What about the plutonium? People are worried about the plutonium!

People are worried about the plutonium, but in a breeder reactor, you get rid of the plutonium because you split it into fission products, and fission products are still radioactive, but they have much shorter half-lives than plutonium. So rather than being radioactive for, say, a million years, they're only radioactive, really, for a couple of centuries, maybe 1000 years, which is a very, very different situation when you think about long-term storage.

I read so many papers and memos from the ’50s when these reactors were first being built and demonstrated, and they worked, by the way, they're actually quite easy to build, it just happened in a couple of years. Breeder reactors were really seen as the future of humanity's power demands. Forget traditional nuclear power stations that we all use at the moment, which are just kind of once through and then you throw away 95 percent of the energy at the end of it. These breeder reactors were really, really seen as the future.

They never came to fruition because we discovered lots of uranium around the globe, and so the supply of uranium went up around the time that the nuclear power expansion around the world kind of seized up, so the uranium demand dropped as the supply increased, so the demand for these breeder reactors kind of petered out and fizzled out. But if we're really, really serious about the medium-term future of humanity when it comes to energy, abundance, and prosperity, we need to be taking a second look at these breeder reactors because there's enough uranium and thorium in the ground around the world now to power the world for almost 1000 years. After that, we'll have something else. Maybe we'll have nuclear fusion.

Well, I hope it doesn't take a thousand years for nuclear fusion.

Yes, me too.

Not your mother’s reactors (17:25)

In 2005, France got 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear. They almost decarbonized their grid by accident before anybody cared about climate change, and that was during a time when their economy was absolutely booming.

I don’t think most people are aware of how much innovation has taken place around nuclear in the past few years, or even few decades. It’s not just a climate change issue or that we need to power these data centers — the technology has vastly improved. There are newer, safer technologies, so we’re not talking about 1975-style reactors.

Even if it were the 1975-style reactors, that would be fine because they’re pretty good and they have an absolutely impeccable safety record punctuated by a very small number of high-profile events such as Chernobyl and Fukushima. I'm not to count Three Mile Island on that list because nobody died, but you know what I mean.

But the modern nuclear reactors are amazing. The ones that are coming out of France, the EPRs, the European Power Reactors, there are going to be two of those in the UK's new nuclear power station, and they've been designed to withstand an airplane flying into the side of them, so they're basically bomb-proof.

As for these small modular reactors, that's getting people very excited, too. As their name suggests, they're small. How small is a reasonable question — the answer is as small as you want to go. These things are scalable, and I've seen designs for just one-megawatt reactors that could easily fit inside a shipping container. They could fit in the parking lots around the side of a data center, or in the basement even, all the way up to multi-hundred-megawatt reactors that could fit on a couple of tennis courts worth of land. But it's really the modular part that's the most interesting thing. That's the ‘M’ and that's never been done before.

Which really gets to the economics of the SMRs.

It really does. The idea is you could build upwards of 90 percent of these reactors on a factory line. We know from the history of industrialization that as soon as you start mass producing things, the unit cost just plummets and the timescales shrink. No one has achieved that yet, though. There's a lot of hype around small modular reactors, and so it's kind of important not to get complacent and really keep our eye on the ultimate goal, which is mass-production and mass rapid deployment of nuclear power stations, crucially in the places where you need them the most, as well.

We often think about just decarbonizing our electricity supply or decoupling our electricity supply from volatilities in the fossil fuel market, but it’s about more than electricity, as well. We need heat for things like making steel, making the ammonia that feeds most people on the planet, food and drinks factories, car manufacturers, plants that rely on steam. You need heat, and thankfully, the primary energy from a nuclear reactor is heat. The electricity is secondary. We have to put effort into making that. The heat just kind of happens. So there's this idea that we could use the surplus heat from nuclear reactors to power industrial processes that are very, very difficult to decarbonize. Small modular reactors would be perfect for that because you could nestle them into the industrial centers that need the heat close by. So honestly, it is really our imaginations that are the limits with these small modular reactors.

They've opened a couple of nuclear reactors down in Georgia here. The second one was a lot cheaper and faster to build because they had already learned a bunch of lessons building that first one, and it really gets at sort of that repeatability where every single reactor doesn't have to be this one-off bespoke project. That is not how it works in the world of business. How you get cheaper things is by building things over and over, you get very good at building them, and then you're able to turn these things out at scale. That has not been the economic situation with nuclear reactors, but hopefully with small modular reactors, or even if we just start building a lot of big advanced reactors, we'll get those economies of scale and hopefully the economic issue will then take care of itself.

For sure, and it is exactly the same here in the UK. The last reactor that we connected to the grid was in 1995. I was 18 months old. I don't even know if I was fluent in speaking at 18 months old. I was really, really young. Our newest nuclear power station, Hinkley Point C, which is going to come online in the next couple of years, was hideously expensive. The uncharitable view of that is that it's just a complete farce and is just a complete embarrassment, but honestly, you've got to think about it: 1995, the last nuclear reactor in the UK, it was going to take a long time, it was going to be expensive, basically doing it from scratch. We had no supply chain. We didn't really have a workforce that had ever built a nuclear reactor before, and with this new reactor that just got announced a couple of weeks ago, the projected price is 20 percent cheaper, and it is still too expensive, it's still more expensive than it should be, but you're exactly right.

By tapping into those economies of scale, the cost per nuclear reactor will fall, and France did this in the ’70s and ’80s. Their nuclear program is so amazing. France is still the most nuclear nation on the planet as a share of its total electricity. In 2005, France got 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear. They almost decarbonized their grid by accident before anybody cared about climate change, and that was during a time when their economy was absolutely booming. By the way, still today, all of those reactors are still working and they pay less than the European Union average for that electricity, so this idea that nuclear makes your electricity expensive is simply not true. They built 55 nuclear reactors in 25 years, and they did them in parallel. It was just absolutely amazing. I would love to see a French-style nuclear rollout in all developed countries across the world. I think that would just be absolutely amazing.

Commercial fusion, coming soon . . . ? (23:06)

I think we're pretty good at doing things when we put our minds to it, but certainly not in the next couple of decades. But luckily, we already have a proven way of producing lots of energy, and that's with nuclear fission, in the meantime.

What is your enthusiasm level or expectation about nuclear fusion? I can tell you that the Silicon Valley people I talk to are very positive. I know they're inherently very positive people, but they're very enthusiastic about the prospects over the next decade, if not sooner, of commercial fusion. How about you?

It would be incredible. The last question that I was asked in my PhD interview 10 years ago was, “If you could solve one scientific or engineering problem, what would it be?” and my answer was nuclear fusion. And that would be the answer that I would give today. It just seems to me to be obviously the solution to the long-term energy needs of humanity. However, I'm less optimistic, perhaps, than the Silicon Valley crowd. The running joke, of course, is that it's always 40 years away and it recedes into the future at one year per year.

So I would love to be proved wrong, but realistically — no one's even got it working in a prototype power station. That’s before we even think about commercializing it and deploying it at scale. I really, really think that we're decades away, maybe even something like a century. I'd be surprised if it took longer than a century, actually. I think we're pretty good at doing things when we put our minds to it, but certainly not in the next couple of decades. But luckily, we already have a proven way of producing lots of energy, and that's with nuclear fission, in the meantime.

Don't go to California with that attitude. I can tell you that even when I go there and I talk about AI, if I say that AI will do anything less than improve economic growth by a factor of 100, they just about throw me out over there. Let me just finish up by asking you this: Earlier, we mentioned Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. How resilient do you think this nuclear renaissance is to an accident?

Even if we take the rate of accident over the last 70 years of nuclear power production and we maintain that same level of rate of accident, if you like, it's still one of the safest things that our species does, and everyone talks about the death toll from nuclear power, but nobody talks about the lives that it's already saved because of the fossil fuels, that it's displaced fossil fuels. They're so amazing in some ways, they're so convenient, they're so energy-dense, they've created the modern world as we all enjoy it in the developed world and as the developing world is heading towards it.

But there are some really, really nasty consequences of fossil fuels, and whether or not you care about climate change, even the air pollution alone and the toll that that takes on human health is enough to want to phase them out. Nuclear power already is orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels and I read this really amazing paper that globally, it was something like between the ’70s and the ’90s, nuclear power saved about two million lives because of the fossil fuels that it displaced. That's, again, orders of magnitude more lives that have been lost as a consequence of nuclear power, mostly because of Chernobyl and Fukushima. Even if the safety record of nuclear in the past stays the same and we forward-project that into the future, it's still a winning horse to bet on.

If in the UK they've started up one new nuclear reactor in the past 30 years, right? How many would you guess will be started over the next 15 years?

Four or five. Something like that, I think; although I don't know.

Is that a significant number to you?

It's not enough for my liking. I would like to see many, many more. Look at France. I know I keep going back to it, but it's such a brilliant example. If France hadn't done what they'd done in between the ’70s and the ’90s — 55 nuclear reactors in 25 years, all of which are still working — it would be a much more difficult case to make because there would be no historical precedent for it. So, maybe predictably, I wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a French-scale nuclear rollout, let's put it that way.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

Micro Reads

▶ Economics

* The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics - WSJ

* AI Spending Is Propping Up the Economy, Right? It’s Complicated. - Barron’s

* Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. - NYT

* Sam Altman says Gen Z are the 'luckiest' kids in history thanks to AI, despite mounting job displacement dread - NYT

* Lab-Grown Diamonds Are Testing the Power of Markets - Bberg Opinion

* Why globalisation needs a leader: Hegemons, alignment, and trade - CEPR

* The Rising Returns to R&D: Ideas Are not Getting Harder to Find - SSRN

* An Assessment of China's Innovative Capacity - The Fed

* Markets are so used to the TACO trade they didn't even blink when Trump extended a tariff delay with China - Fortune

* Labor unions mobilize to challenge advance of algorithms in workplaces - Wapo

* ChatGPT loves this bull market. Human investors are more cautious. - Axios

* What is required for a post-growth model? - Arxiv

* What Would It Take to Bring Back US Manufacturing? - Bridgewater

▶ Business

* An AI Replay of the Browser Wars, Bankrolled by Google - Bberg

* Alexa Got an A.I. Brain Transplant. How Smart Is It Now? - NYT

* Google and IBM believe first workable quantum computer is in sight - FT

* Why does Jeff Bezos keep buying launches from Elon Musk? - Ars

* Beijing demands Chinese tech giants justify purchases of Nvidia’s H20 chips - FT

* An AI Replay of the Browser Wars, Bankrolled by Google - Bberg Opinion

* Why Businesses Say Tariffs Have a Delayed Effect on Inflation - Richmond Fed

* Lisa Su Runs AMD—and Is Out for Nvidia’s Blood - Wired

* Forget the White House Sideshow. Intel Must Decide What It Wants to Be. - WSJ

* With Billions at Risk, Nvidia CEO Buys His Way Out of the Trade Battle - WSJ

* Donald Trump’s 100% tariff threat looms over chip sector despite relief for Apple - FT

* Sam Altman challenges Elon Musk with plans for Neuralink rival - FT

* Threads is nearing X's daily app users, new data shows - TechCrunch

▶ Policy/Politics

* Trump's China gamble - Axios

* U.S. Government to Take Cut of Nvidia and AMD A.I. Chip Sales to China - NYT

* A Guaranteed Annual Income Flop - WSJ Opinion

* Big Tech’s next major political battle may already be brewing in your backyard - Politico

* Trump order gives political appointees vast powers over research grants - Nature

* China has its own concerns about Nvidia H20 chips - FT

* How the US Could Lose the AI Arms Race to China - Bberg Opinion

* America’s New AI Plan Is Great. There’s Just One Problem. - Bberg Opinion

* Trump, Seeking Friendlier Economic Data, Names New Statistics Chief - NYT

* Trump’s chief science adviser faces a storm of criticism: what's next? - Nature

* Trump Is Squandering the Greatest Gift of the Manhattan Project - NYT Opinion

▶ AI/Digital

* Can OpenAI’s GPT-5 model live up to sky-high expectations? - FT

* Google, Schmoogle: When to Ditch Web Search for Deep Research - WSJ

* AI Won’t Kill Software. It Will Simply Give It New Life. - Barron's

* Chatbot Conversations Never End. That’s a Problem for Autistic People. - WSJ

* Volunteers fight to keep ‘AI slop’ off Wikipedia - Wapo

* Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Solve U.S. Chip-Making Dilemma - WSJ

* GenAI Misinformation, Trust, and News Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment - NBER

* GPT-5s Are Alive: Basic Facts, Benchmarks and the Model Card - Don’t Worry About the Vase

* What you may have missed about GPT-5 - MIT

* Why A.I. Should Make Parents Rethink Posting Photos of Their Children Online - NYT

* 21 Ways People Are Using A.I. at Work - NYT

* AI and Jobs: The Final Word (Until the Next One) - EIG

* These workers don’t fear artificial intelligence. They’re getting degrees in it. - Wapo

* AI Gossip - Arxiv

* Meet the early-adopter judges using AI - MIT

* The GPT-5 rollout has been a big mess - Ars

* A Humanoid Social Robot as a Teaching Assistant in the Classroom - Arxiv

* OpenAI Scrambles to Update GPT-5 After Users Revolt - Wired

* Sam Altman and the whale - MIT

* This is what happens when ChatGPT tries to write scripture - Vox

* How AI could create the first one-person unicorn - Economist

* AI Robs My Students of the Ability to Think - WSJ Opinion

* Part I: Tricks or Traps? A Deep Dive into RL for LLM Reasoning - Arxiv

▶ Biotech/Health

* Scientists Are Finally Making Progress Against Alzheimer’s - WSJ Opinion

* The Dawn of a New Era in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson's Treatment - RealClearScience

* RFK Jr. shifts $500 million from mRNA research to 'safer' vaccines. Do the data back that up? - Reason

* How Older People Are Reaping Brain Benefits From New Tech - NYT

* Did Disease Defeat Napoleon? - SciAm

* Scientists Discover a Viral Cause of One of The World's Most Common Cancers - ScienceAlert

* ‘A tipping point’: An update from the frontiers of Alzheimer’s disease research - Yale News

* A new measure of health is revolutionising how we think about ageing - NS

* First proof brain’s powerhouses drive – and can reverse – dementia symptoms - NA

* The Problem Is With Men’s Sperm - NYT Opinion

▶ Clean Energy/Climate

* The Whole World Is Switching to EVs Faster Than You - Bberg Opinion

* Misperceptions About Air Pollution: Implications for Willingness to Pay and Environmental Inequality - NBER

* Texas prepares for war as invasion of flesh-eating flies appears imminent - Ars

* Data Center Energy Demand Will Double Over the Next Five Years - Apollo Academy

* Why Did Air Conditioning Adoption Accelerate Faster Than Predicted? Evidence from Mexico - NBER

* Microwaving rocks could help mining operations pull CO2 out of the air - NS

* Ford’s Model T Moment Isn’t About the Car - Heatmap

* Five countries account for 71% of the world’s nuclear generation capacity - EIA

* AI may need the power equivalent of 50 large nuclear plants - E&E

▶ Space/Transportation

* NASA plans to build a nuclear reactor on the Moon—a space lawyer explains why - Ars

* Rocket Lab's Surprise Stock Move After Solid Earnings - Barron’s

▶ Up Wing/Down Wing

* James Lovell, the steady astronaut who brought Apollo 13 home safely, has died - Ars

* Vaccine Misinformation Is a Symptom of a Dangerous Breakdown - NYT Opinion

* We’re hardwired for negativity. That doesn’t mean we’re doomed to it. - Vox

* To Study Viking Seafarers, He Took 26 Voyages in a Traditional Boat - NYT

* End is near for the landline-based service that got America online in the ’90s - Wapo

▶ Substacks/Newsletters

* Who will actually profit from the AI boom? - Noahpinion

* OpenAI GPT-5 One Unified System - AI Supremacy

* Proportional representation is the solution to gerrymandering - Slow Boring

* Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist - The Ecomodernist

* How Many Jobs Depend on Exports? - Conversable Economist

* ChatGPT Classic - Joshua Gans’ Newsletter

* Is Air Travel Getting Worse? - Maximum Progress

▶ Social Media

* On AI Progress - @daniel_271828

* On AI Usage - @emollick

* On Generative AI and Student Learning - @jburnmurdoch

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