Let's Know Things Podcast Por Colin Wright arte de portada

Let's Know Things

Let's Know Things

De: Colin Wright
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A calm, non-shouty, non-polemical, weekly news analysis podcast for folks of all stripes and leanings who want to know more about what's happening in the world around them. Hosted by analytic journalist Colin Wright since 2016.

letsknowthings.substack.comColin Wright Política y Gobierno
Episodios
  • Thorium Reactors

    Thorium Reactors
    Nov 25 2025
    This week we talk about radioactive waste, neutrons, and burn while breeding cycles.We also discuss dry casks, radioactive decay, and uranium.Recommended Book: Breakneck by Dan WangTranscriptRadioactive waste, often called nuclear waste, typically falls into one of three categories: low-level waste that contains a small amount of radioactivity that will last a very short time—this is stuff like clothes or tools or rags that have been contaminated—intermediate-level waste, which has been contaminated enough that it requires shielding, and high-level waste, which is very radioactive material that creates a bunch of heat because of all the radioactive decay, so it requires both shield and cooling.Some types of radioactive waste, particularly spent fuel of the kind used in nuclear power plants, can be reprocessed, which means separating it into other types of useful products, including another type of mixed nuclear fuel that can be used in lieu of uranium, though generally not economically unless uranium supplies are low. About a third of all spent nuclear fuel has already been reprocessed in some way.About 4% of even the recyclable stuff, though, doesn’t have that kind of second-life purpose, and that, combined with the medium- and long-lived waste that is quite dangerous to have just sitting around, has to be stored somehow, shielded and maybe cooled, and in some cases for a very long time: some especially long-lived fission products have half-lives that stretch into the hundreds of thousands or millions of years, which means they will be radioactive deep into the future, many times longer than humans have existed as a species.According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, something like 490,000 metric tons of radioactive spent fuel is currently being stored, on a temporary basis, at hundreds of specialized sites around the world. The majority of this radioactive waste is stored in pools of spent fuel water, cooled in that water somewhere near the nuclear reactors where the waste originated. Other waste has been relocated into what’re called dry casks, which are big, barrel-like containers made of several layers of steel, concrete, and other materials, which surround a canister that holds the waste, and the canister is itself surrounded by inert gas. These casks hold and cool waste using natural air convection, so they don’t require any kind of external power or water sources, while other solutions, including storage in water, sometimes does—and often the fuel is initially stored in pools, and is then moved to casks for longer-term storage.Most of the radioactive waste produced today comes in the form of spend fuel from nuclear reactors, which are typically small ceramic pellets made of low-enriched uranium oxide. These pellets are stacked on top of each other and encased in metal, and that creates what’s called a fuel rod.In the US, alone, about 2,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel is created each year, which is just shy of half an olympic sized swimming pool in terms of volume, and in many countries, the non-reuseable stuff is eventually buried, near the surface for the low- to intermediate-level waste, and deeper for high-level waste—deeper, in this context, meaning something like 200-1000 m, which is about 650-3300 feet, beneath the surface.The goal of such burying is to prevent potential leakage that might impact life on the surface, while also taking advantage of the inherent stability and cooler nature of underground spaces which are chosen for their isolation, natural barriers, and water impermeability, and which are also often reinforced with human-made supports and security, blocking everything off and protecting the surrounding area so nothing will access these spaces far into the future, and so that they won’t be broken open by future glaciation or other large-scale impacts, either.What I’d like to talk about today is another potential use and way of dealing with this type of waste, and why a recent, related development in China is being heralded as such a big deal.—An experimental nuclear reactor was built in the Gobi Desert by the Chinese Academy of Sciences Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, and back in 2023 the group achieved its first criticality, got started up, basically, and it has been generating heat through nuclear fission ever since.What that means is that the nuclear reactor did what a nuclear reactor is supposed to do. Most such reactors exist to generate heat, which then creates steam and spins turbines, which generates electricity.What’s special about this reactor, though, is that it is a thorium molten salt reactor, which means it uses thorium instead of uranium as a fuel source, and the thorium is processed into uranium as part of the energy-making process, because thorium only contains trace amounts of fissile material, which isn’t enough to get a power-generating, nuclear chain reaction going.This reactor was able to successfully ...
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    13 m
  • Extrajudicial Killing

    Extrajudicial Killing
    Nov 18 2025
    This week we talk about Venezuela, casus belli, and drug smuggling.We also discuss oil reserves, Maduro, and Machado.Recommended Book: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt DinnimanTranscriptVenezuela, which suffered all sorts of political and economic crises under former president Hugo Chávez, has suffered even more of the same, and on a more dramatic scale, under Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro.Both Chávez and Maduro have ruled over autocratic regimes, turning ostensibly democratic Venezuelan governments into governments ruled by a single person, and those they like and empower and reward, over time removing anyone from power who might challenge them, and collapsing all checks and balances within the structure of their government.They still hold elections, then, but like in Russia, the voting is just for show, the outcome predetermined, and anyone who gets too popular and who isn’t favored by the existing regime is jailed or killed or otherwise neutralized; the votes are then adjusted when necessary to make it look like the regime is still popular, and anyone who challenges that seeming popularity is likewise taken care of.As a result of that state of affairs, an unpopular regime with absolute power running things into the ground over the course of two autocrats’ administrations, Venezuela has suffered immense hyperinflation, high levels of crime and widespread disease, ever-increasing mortality rates, and even starvation, as fundamentals like food periodically become scarce. This has led to a swell of emigration out of the country, which has, during the past decade, become the largest ever recorded refugee crisis in the Americas, those who leave mostly flooding into neighboring countries like Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.As of 2025, it’s estimated that nearly 8 million people, more than 20% of Venezuela’s entire population as of 2017, has fled the country to get away from the government, its policies, its collapsed economy, and the cultural homogeny that has led to so much crime, conflict, and oppression of those not favored by the people in charge.This has also led to some Venezuelans trying to get into the US, which was part of the justification for a proposed invasion of the country, by the US government, under the first Trump administration in 2017.The idea was that this is a corrupt, weak government that also happens to possess the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Its production of oil has collapsed along with everything else, in part because the government is so ineffectual, and in part because of outside forces, like longstanding sanctions by the US, which makes selling and profiting from said oil on the global market difficult.Apparently, though, Trump also just liked the idea of invading Venezuela through US ally Colombia, saying—according to Trump’s National Security advisor at the time, John Bolton—that Venezuela is really part of the US, so it would be “cool” for the US to take it. Trump also later said, in 2023, that when he left office Venezuela was about to collapse, and that he would have taken it over if he had been reelected instead of losing to Joe Biden, and the US would have then kept all the country’s oil.So there’s long been a seeming desire by Trump to invade Venezuela, partly on vibe grounds, the state being weak and why shouldn’t we own it, that kind of thing? But underlying that is the notion of the US being a country that can stomp into weaker countries, take their oil, and then nation-build, similar to what the government seemed to be trying to do when it invaded Iraq in the early 2000s, using 9/11 as a casus belli, an excuse to go to war, with an uninvolved nation that happened to own a bunch of oil resources the US government wanted for itself.What I’d like to talk about today is the seeming resurgence of that narrative, but this time with an, actual tangible reason to believe an invasion of Venezuela might occur sometime soon.—As I mentioned, though previously kind of a success story in South America, bringing people in from all over the continent and the world, Venezuela has substantially weakened under its two recent autocratic leaders, who have rebuilt everything in their image, and made corruption and self-serving the main driver behind their decisions for the direction of the country.A very popular candidate, María Corina Machado, was barred from participating in the country’s 2024 election, the country’s Supreme Court ruling that a 15-year ban on her holding public office because of her involvement with an alleged plot against Maduro with a previous candidate for office, Juan Guaido; Guiado is now in exile, run out of the country for winning an election against Maduro, which Maduro’s government has claimed wasn’t legit, but which dozens of governments recognize as having been legitimate, despite Maduro’s clinging to power after losing.So Machado is accused of being corrupt by Maduro’s corrupt government, and thus ...
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    15 m
  • Nitazenes

    Nitazenes
    Nov 11 2025
    This week we talk about OxyContin, opium, and the British East India Company.We also discuss isotonitazene, fentanyl, and Perdue.Recommended Book: The Thinking Machine by Stephen WittTranscriptOpioids have been used as painkillers by humans since at least the Neolithic period; there’s evidence that people living in the Iberian and Italian Peninsulas kept opium poppy seeds with them, and there’s even more evidence that the Ancient Greeks were big fans of opium, using it to treat pain and as a sleep aid.Opium was the only available opioid for most of human history, and it was almost always considered to be a net-positive, despite its downsides. It was incorporated into a mixture called laudanum, which was a blend of opium and alcohol, in the 17th century, and that helped it spread globally as Europeans spread globally, though it was also in use locally, elsewhere, especially in regions where the opium poppy grew naturally.In India, for instance, opium was grown and often used for its painkilling properties, but when the British East India Company took over, they decided to double-down on the substance as a product they could monopolize and grow into a globe-spanning enterprise.They went to great lengths to expand production and prevent the rise of potential competitors, in India and elsewhere, and they created new markets for opium in China by forcing the product onto Chinese markets, initially via smuggling, and then eventually, after fighting a series of wars focused on whether or not the British should be allowed to sell opium on the Chinese market, the British defeated the Chinese. And among other severely unbalanced new treaties, including the ceding of the Kowloon peninsula to the British as part of Hong Kong, which they controlled as a trading port, and the legalization of Christians coming into the country, proselytizing, and owning property, the Chinese were forced to accept the opium trade. This led to generations of addicts, even more so than before, when opium was available only illicitly, and it became a major bone of contention between the two countries, and informed China’s relationship with the world in general, especially other Europeans and the US, moving forward.A little bit later, in the early 1800s, a German pharmacist was able to isolate a substance called morphine from opium. He published a paper on this process in 1817, and in addition to this being the first alkaloid, the first organic compound of this kind to be isolated from a medicinal plant, which was a milestone in the development of modern drug discovery, it also marked the arrival of a new seeming wonder drug, that could ease pain, but also help control cold-related symptoms like coughing and gut issues, like diarrhea. Like many such substances back in the day, it was also often used to treat women who were demonstrating ‘nervous character,’ which was code for ‘behaving in ways men didn’t like or understand.’Initially, it was thought that, unlike with opium, morphine wasn’t addictive. And this thinking was premised on the novel application method often used for morphine, the hypermedia needle, which arrived a half-century after that early 1800s isolation of morphine from opium, but which became a major driver of the new drug’s success and utility. Such drugs, derived scientifically rather than just processing a plant, could be administered at specific, controllable doses. So surely, it was thought, this would alleviate those pesky addictive symptoms that many people experienced when using opioids in a more natural, less science-y way.That, of course, turned out not to be the case. But it didn’t stop the progression of this drug type, and the further development of more derivations of it, including powerful synthetic opioids, which first hit the scene in the mid-20th century.What I’d like to talk about today is the recent wave of opioid addictions, especially but not exclusively in the US, and the newest concern in this space, which is massively more powerful than anything that’s come before.—As I mentioned, there have been surges in opioid use, latent and externally forced, throughout modern human history.The Chinese saw an intense wave of opioid addiction after the British forced opium onto their markets, to the point that there was a commonly held belief that the British were trying to overthrow and enslave the Chinese by weighing them down with so many addicts who were incapable of doing much of anything; which, while not backed by the documentation we have from the era—it seems like they were just chasing profits—is not impossible, given what the Brits were up to around the world at that point in history.That said, there was a huge influx in opioid use in the late-1980s, when a US-based company called Purdue Pharma began producing and pushing a time-released opioid medication, which really hit the big-time in 1995, when they released a version of the drug called OxyContin.OxyContin ...
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    14 m
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