Isabelle Boemeke | What everyone gets wrong about nuclear energy

Beatrice: Welcome to the Existential Podcast. I’m Beatrice Erkers, and I’m here today with Isabelle Boemeke at the Progress Conference. We’re not live, but we’re recording from the conference, and I’m very excited to talk to you.

You just published this book called Rad Future, which is about how nuclear energy can help us create a rad future. You’re also something I think is very unique, because you’re literally an influencer for nuclear. I’m very curious to unpack that a bit more. Maybe we should have more influencers for all the important stuff.

Could you tell us a bit about who you are and how you became a nuclear influencer?

Isabelle: It’s such a long story. I’ll try not to make it brutally long.

I was born in a small town in the south of Brazil, and this will become relevant later. I immigrated to the United States around 2008 to pursue a modeling career, and I did that for over a decade.

Somewhere along the way, I picked up an interest in science. I hadn’t really been taught about evolution because I went to Catholic schools for most of my education in Brazil. When I was 19, I read a book by Richard Dawkins called The Greatest Show on Earth. It was about evolution, and I remember thinking, “Oh my God, how did I not know any of this?”

So I went down a rabbit hole, tried to educate myself as much as I could on scientific topics, and became very interested in science. I started following a bunch of scientists on Twitter.

One of them was a planetary scientist called Carolyn Porco. She worked on the imaging team of the Cassini mission, which, for those who don’t know, was a mission that went to Saturn and sent images back to Earth. She’s an amazing scientist.

About ten years ago, she tweeted about molten-salt thorium reactors, which are a type of nuclear reactor. You just made a face like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” and that was exactly my reaction back then. I thought, “What is this?” But it sounded really cool.

What was shocking was that this was the first time I’d heard or seen anybody speaking positively about nuclear. That stuck in my head — both as a curiosity about the technology itself and about this interesting fact that somebody could be positive about nuclear. I thought the consensus was that it was bad.

Fast forward to 2019, which was five years ago. I saw images of the Amazon on fire, and that was the same year as the huge Australian fires and the California fires. I don’t know if you remember the images of the orange skies.

I grew up with climate change being a problem for my generation, but it always felt like a future problem. In 2019, it was the first time I realized the severity of it and that it’s here now; it’s not a future problem anymore. I just felt really compelled to do something about climate change.

That sounds insane and naive, but I thought, “Okay, I want to do something.” I had no technical background, obviously. So I started looking into solutions. One of the most talked-about solutions is decarbonization, which is basically getting rid of fossil fuels that emit carbon into the atmosphere. One of the best ways to do that is to swap out fossil fuels for clean energy.

When I looked at all the clean energy sources, nuclear was the only one that had a bad PR problem. I thought, “Okay, that’s interesting.” I had time to do a deep dive on the technology itself, and when you don’t know much about nuclear or you have a lot of misconceptions, then you learn about it properly for the first time, you come out the other side thinking, “I have to inform the whole world about this amazing technology,” because the reality is so different from public perception.

For a long time, I asked myself, “What can I do? What role can I play?” Then one day I had this crazy idea to become a nuclear energy influencer. When I thought of it, it seemed so outrageous that it made me laugh, and that reaction made me realize I was onto something.

I started pitching it softly to people. I’d be on a flight, sitting next to someone, and they’d ask, “What do you do for a living?” and I’d say, “I’m a nuclear energy influencer.” The responses were always, “Oh my God!” It was never, “Oh, okay, cool,” and then end of conversation. They were always excited and at least curious, and they wanted to learn more.

It felt like every conversation left people more informed and opened their minds so they wanted to learn more on their own. That’s how I came up with the idea.

Beatrice: I think it’s a brilliant idea, and obviously it’s worked out well. It’s also a good example of something you said: you wanted to create change, but you didn’t know how.

That’s something I come back to a lot, because this is the Existential Hope Podcast, and actually having hope that you can change something is what gives you agency. You obviously had agency, and we should probably encourage more people to feel that they can do something, even if they’re not a scientist or technologist.

Isabelle: Totally. There’s always something you can do. In this case, the problem was very specifically a bad public perception. There’s a lot that can be done in the communication arena, especially for someone who doesn’t have technical expertise.

To your point: people can always choose to do something. I think there’s a mindset missing in society — the idea that problems are solvable and that we are the ones who get to solve them.

It’s almost like we’ve gotten to a point where, if a problem arises — especially if it’s a big problem — people think we should give up because it’s too hard, instead of thinking, “Okay, this is a very complex problem. How can I break it down into smaller problems until I get to something that I can actually fix?”

Beatrice: Growing up where you grew up in southern Brazil, I think that’s an interesting place to start for why energy is such an important issue. To fix so many problems, we need reliable access to clean energy. That’s hugely important, and maybe a lot of people don’t fully realize that.

Growing up where you did, did you experience things that made that more tangible?

Isabelle: Definitely. People who grew up in an energy-rich society don’t really understand what a life with low energy access looks like. It’s basically impossible to grasp, because everything is so convenient and everything is there for you.

I grew up in a small town in a rural part of Brazil in the ’90s. We had electricity, though there were occasional blackouts, but things like air conditioning, dishwashers, laundry machines, or heating — because it gets very cold there in the winter — those were not common. People talked about air conditioners, but they were so expensive: not just the machines, but the electricity you’d need to run them.

I remember in winter, everything was so cold because there was no central heating. Even taking a shower was torture because the water wasn’t hot enough and it was just a weak sprinkle here and there. In the summer, there was no air conditioning, so you couldn’t sleep well at night. You’d open the windows and mosquitoes would come in.

These things might sound like luxuries, but they’re things that make your life a little easier. And especially when you talk about laundry machines and dishwashers — those tasks take a lot of time. Without machines, you spend hours cleaning clothes and dishes, time you could invest in learning a new skill or simply having fun with friends.

Growing up that way gave me a different appreciation for access to plentiful energy. It’s also what drives my view that the solution to climate change is not to force everybody to live in poverty. There is a fraction of people who actually believe that — more commonly talked about as “degrowth.”

Degrowth is the idea that it’s not enough to swap our dirty energy sources for clean ones; we have to completely change our society and stop producing and consuming so many goods.

I’ve talked to people who are proponents of this. I don’t believe they’re evil or that they want to hurt people. I think they’re trying to solve the problem and realizing that energy consumption keeps going up. We can replace some amount of fossil fuels, but because total energy consumption keeps increasing, it feels like it’s never enough.

I understand where they’re coming from, but I’ve never seen a plan that I find credible. When I ask, “How do we do this at scale? How do we implement degrowth?” they’ll say, “We should use less energy.” And then you have to ask, “Who is ‘we’? The United States? The American continent? Europe? Who?”

Then: “How much less? Ten percent? Twenty percent? Fifty percent less?”

And how do you enforce that? Do you send people to jail because they have a diesel generator? Do you arrest people? Do you kill them if they use too much energy?

When you start getting into the details of how degrowth would be implemented, it’s very hard to see how that could work in an open society. Maybe in an authoritarian one, sure.

And then inevitably what ends up happening is that they want to prevent poorer countries from developing, because those countries would have to burn through a lot of fossil fuels to get to the level of development rich countries have. I have a problem with that, obviously, from a moral perspective.

So I understand where they’re coming from, but I haven’t seen a plan that doesn’t include either keeping poor people poor or punishing people for using energy.

Beatrice: I’m curious to pull on the thread where you said you had never really heard about nuclear, and you thought the consensus was that nuclear is bad. That’s interesting, because where I grew up in Sweden, the consensus was that nuclear is good. We even had a power plant in my hometown. Nobody was afraid of it. People saw it as a place with well-paid jobs. And apparently that’s the case for many nuclear plants — the locals like them. Do you know why that is?

Isabelle: Yes, 100%. If you run polls, the closer you get to a nuclear power plant, the higher the level of public support. That’s where the good jobs are. Diablo Canyon in California, for example, employs about 1,200 people — high-paying, stable jobs. And because nuclear plants run for so long, those jobs can be multi-generational. Sometimes you have three generations of a family working at the plant.

Nuclear plants also pay huge amounts in taxes. So the communities around them very clearly see the benefits.

It’s interesting: there are two kinds of public perception. The general perception — people who don’t live near a plant — tends to be more negative, often because of fears about safety or waste. They don’t see the benefits directly.

But the closer you get to a plant, public support rises.

With renewable energy, it’s almost the opposite: the general vibe is supportive, but the closer you get to actual projects, the more opposition you find. They don’t bring as many jobs, they take up huge amounts of land, the jobs don’t pay as well, and the tax benefits aren’t the same. So the relationship reverses.

Beatrice: That’s really interesting. So let’s go back to why nuclear has this bad reputation. I know you talk about this a lot in Rad Future. Can you expand on that?

Isabelle: Of course. When people think of nuclear, the first thing that comes to mind is accidents or a three-eyed fish from The Simpsons. But if you unpeel the onion, you get to the core: nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 in Germany — right before World War II — and the first use of nuclear fission was to create bombs.

The world was introduced to “nuclear” through Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That creates a massive emotional scar. A whole generation hears “atomic” and thinks “mushroom cloud.”

Then after World War II, we immediately went into the Cold War. The U.S. and the Soviet Union were stockpiling nuclear weapons. Kids in the U.S. were doing “duck and cover” drills in school. The Cuban Missile Crisis terrified everyone. People went to bed for 10 days thinking they might not wake up.

So you have layer upon layer of emotional trauma attached to the word “nuclear.”

By the time the first nuclear accident happened — Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, in 1979 — people were already primed to think this technology was dangerous. And humans are emotional creatures: we react emotionally first, and then we use logic to justify how we feel.

After Three Mile Island, instead of saying, “This accident happened, but nobody died,” the reaction was, “See? This is why it’s dangerous.”

Nobody died from Three Mile Island. Nobody even got sick. We know that now.

It also didn’t help that 12 days before the accident, the movie The China Syndrome premiered — with Jane Fonda playing a journalist uncovering dangerous nuclear plant operations. In the film, the plant nearly melts down. Then something eerily similar happened in real life less than two weeks later. The timing was terrible.

Then Chernobyl happened in 1986 — a real, catastrophic accident where people died. For most people, this confirmed everything they already believed.

But if you zoom out: in more than 70 years of operation, out of hundreds of reactors, there have been only three serious accidents. Statistically, nuclear is among the safest energy sources. It’s as safe as solar and wind, and safer than hydro.

Beatrice: That’s surprising — especially the hydro part.

Isabelle: Nobody expects that. But most people don’t know about the big hydropower disaster. In 1975, in China, a hydropower dam collapsed and killed about 200,000 people. That one accident alone makes hydro more dangerous than nuclear in terms of total deaths. But nobody heard about it for 20 years because China censored information.

If you ask people how many died at Chernobyl, they’ll say hundreds of thousands or millions. I’ve heard someone say nine million — which is the population of Sweden!

But again, fewer than 100 confirmed fatalities, and about 4,000 estimated long-term deaths, which is far lower than people imagine.

Beatrice: So after you learned all of this and decided, “Why aren’t we doing this?” you chose to become an influencer. How did you even start? And how do you think people should choose what to advocate for? Because someone like Jane Fonda famously influenced people against nuclear.

Isabelle: That’s a question I ask myself a lot — “Am I influencing for the right thing?” Anti-nuclear people think I’m not. I think I am.

For nuclear, I knew it was good because the data was overwhelming. I wasn’t digging five pages deep into Google to confirm a bias. The data is mainstream: nuclear is extremely safe, low-carbon, highly reliable.

And I visited nuclear plants. That mattered. Seeing how they handle waste in reality solidified my confidence. My message on waste is strong — I think nuclear waste is not a problem at all. It’s the only waste stream we fully account for. Every gram is tracked, stored, and contained. Nothing else in our industrial society is managed that responsibly.

So my rule was: rely on strong data and firsthand experience.

Some topics are harder — like whether COVID was a lab leak. People shut down the discussion early on by calling it racist, even though now it’s considered a real possibility. There’s no consensus, but it’s plausible.

So not everything has clear data the way nuclear does.

Beatrice: Maybe that’s a lesson: some causes are better suited for influencing than others. Nuclear has overwhelming evidence. Some topics are full of uncertainty or require nuance that’s hard to package into influencer-sized messages.

Isabelle: Exactly. And some problems are inherently about the future — like AI safety — where you’re dealing with probabilities and unknowns. That makes it harder.

For nuclear, the evidence is here. For 70+ years. It would take 200 Chernobyls every year for nuclear to match fossil fuels' death toll. So being anti-nuclear today feels like being a flat-earther. It made sense decades ago, when data was scarce and accidents were fresh in people’s minds. Not today.

If you’d like, I can continue with the next section — where the conversation moves into public perception, Germany, progress in the West, and existential hope.

Beatrice: So German policy is an interesting example. And in general, I was just talking to Sam Bowman from Works in Progress. There’s a lot of data showing how badly things are going for the West in terms of actually building things. You mentioned China and Russia doing great with nuclear, while the West isn’t.

And from an existential hope perspective, I’ve also seen data about young people and how pessimistic they are. For example, in the U.S., only about 30% of Gen Z think they’ll have a better life than their parents. That number shocked me. It seems really low.

And at the same time, people aren’t having kids because they think the world is at its worst point ever — which is obviously not true if you look at history. A hundred years ago, one in five babies died, and childbirth was incredibly dangerous.

So I’m interested in this cultural shift you’re trying to influence with your work. Do you have thoughts on how we can fix this mindset? How can we do better?

Isabelle: A couple of things are going on. First, this really is the best time to be alive when you look at disease, childhood mortality, famine — especially if you were born in a country like the U.S.

But I think people are trying to point at something they don’t quite know how to articulate.

There’s this progression: if you don’t have food or shelter, you’re focused on survival and it’s miserable. When you get stability, you start worrying about comfort. Once you get comfort, you start worrying about fulfillment and psychological well-being.

At a certain point, you have all your basic needs met and you don’t have to worry about dying tomorrow — but you still might not be happy. That’s something we know from psychology: after a certain level of wealth, more wealth doesn’t make you happier. In some cases, it makes people less happy because they have more time to think and to compare.

So yes, these are what some might call “first world problems,” but they’re still real problems.

The question becomes: how do we solve that kind of problem? People say, “We live better than anyone 100 years ago.” True — but that doesn’t magically solve modern loneliness or lack of meaning.

So I think people are pointing to something legitimate: “I have everything I need and I’m still unhappy.” That’s a problem worth solving too.

Beatrice: I agree. I think meaning comes from doing meaningful things. It’s not something you feel before doing the thing — it’s something you get from doing the thing. Especially hard things.

Like having kids — it’s hard, but meaningful.

Maybe that’s part of why young people join social movements: they want to feel meaning. But you also mentioned how technology and AI might change things. A lot of people might lose their jobs, which makes meaning even more complicated.

Isabelle: Yes, good luck finding meaning when you suddenly don’t have a job or a role in society. People say, “Everyone will have everything and won’t have to worry about work!” But then what? You’re like a lion in a zoo. You’re fed, you’re comfortable — but you’re not living.

I think society will split into two groups. One group will become very anti-technology and go fully off-grid: homesteading, growing their own food, doing everything manually. They’ll have meaning because their daily survival depends on doing real tasks. We’re already seeing early versions of this — the “trad wife” movement, people wanting to step out of modernity.

The other group will be like the humans in Wall-E: living in total comfort, screens in front of their faces, consuming all day. And we’re already seeing young kids glued to iPads at six months old.

So yes, I think we’re heading toward a real split. And that’s one of the things that makes me uneasy about technological progress — not the progress itself, but the human consequences if we don’t think deeply about meaning.

Beatrice: Exactly. I feel that tension too. On one hand, advancing technology is how we improve life for everyone, avoid suffering, deal with existential risks, and maybe even secure the long-term survival of humanity.

On the other hand, if you don’t acknowledge the challenges that come with progress, it becomes creepy. It starts to sound like blind techno-utopianism.

So it’s refreshing to hear you acknowledge the actual tension.

Isabelle: Yes. I used to be very much one of those people who said, “Stop whining, you have it better than almost anyone ever.” Especially coming from a developing country. I moved to the U.S. and thought, “People here complain so much!”

But then I realized — they’ve just unlocked a new set of problems. That’s the human condition. Every time we solve old problems, we uncover new ones.

Beatrice: Was there anything else you noticed about how people in the U.S. think about progress and the future compared to Brazil?

Isabelle: The biggest difference is that in Brazil, nobody talks about degrowth. Everyone is trying to get a better quality of life — to afford the dishwasher or the air conditioner or whatever will make their life easier.

It’s a different stage in the societal journey.

When I see Brazilian tourists in the U.S., they’re always at the mall buying branded clothes. They go back with suitcases full of Nike and other labels because that signals status in Brazil. It’s like watching a snapshot of a society celebrating its first taste of abundance.

Eventually, though, people realize buying things doesn’t bring lasting happiness. And then you get to the stage the West is in, where people start asking, “What does bring happiness?”

But in terms of future outlook, I’d say Brazil is more pragmatic. People think about next year, not some grand civilizational trajectory. When you’re still climbing the ladder, you don’t have much time to ponder the mysteries of existence.

And I also think people there were generally happier. It could be cultural, but there was more ease, more optimism — even though most had far less than the average American.

Which is why I don’t think the solution to the mental health crisis is simply “fix wealth inequality.” I heard someone say that recently — that solving inequality will solve mental health. That’s not quite right.

Extreme poverty absolutely creates anxiety and suffering. But eradicating poverty is different from eliminating inequality. They’re not the same problem.

Beatrice: We don’t have much time left, so I want to get to a few last things. One is the aesthetics of your work. Your book Rad Future is incredibly aesthetically pleasing — the cover, illustrations, layout. Do you find that aesthetics play an important role in how you reach people?

Isabelle: A hundred percent. People react emotionally first. If you want to change public perception on something like nuclear, aesthetics are powerful.

I asked myself, “How do I make nuclear cool?”

For the book, I wanted the entire thing to feel fun, interesting, and accessible. The cover is colorful and eye-catching. The title placement is unusual. The blurbs on the back are from Paris Hilton, Michael Bloomberg, Grimes, and nuclear scientists — a mix that signals, “Something unexpected is going on here.”

Then inside, I made sure it was short, conversational, full of illustrations, with TL;DR sections at the end of each chapter. I wanted the whole thing to signal, “You can understand this.”

And I think aesthetics are underrated in science communication.

Beatrice: Do you think we need more influencers for important causes? Would you recommend it as a path?

Isabelle: I think it’s incredibly effective. Some people feel like they need to be serious academics, but I care more about what works. Influencers have enormous reach.

Also, simplifying your message for a broad audience forces you to understand your own ideas deeply. You can’t hide behind jargon.

Beatrice: What’s coming next for you? What are you excited about?

Isabelle: Right now, I’m focused on getting the United States to build nuclear again. That’s my main mission for the next year.

I’m also working on a long-term documentary project capturing the nuclear renaissance — the companies, the politics, the technology. It’ll probably take a decade, but I want a full record of this moment.

Beatrice: That’s exciting. Thank you so much, Isabelle — this was really great.

Isabelle: Thank you. Same here.