For those who are getting this for the first time, welcome to Steward. I use this newsletter to share experiences, ideas, and themes that are not regularly covered in nuclear energy headlines but should be. You can find my past emails here and see real-time global CO2 pollution here.
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Nuclear energy is a very small field when you consider that the technology provides 1/5th of our electricity in the U.S. I’ve been involved in this sphere for just over two years and sometime last fall I mostly stopped including people’s last names to refer to them in conversation. This makes for an amazingly supportive atmosphere but also creates challenges when building bridges to other communities: the intentions of those working in the industry can be difficult to understand if you don’t already know someone in it. This is most true if that someone wants to build a nuclear power plant in your backyard. Today however, with the threat of climate change increasing daily and more and more people recognizing the need for rapid decarbonization, some grassroots organizations are initiating conversations about how nuclear power could be responsibly introduced to their own communities.
The Nuclear Alternative Project is one such example. Founded by a group of Puerto Rican engineers working in nuclear energy, NAP engages with communities in Puerto Rico to provide information about advanced nuclear and how it can help the region to build a more modern and dynamic economy. What makes NAP’s work particularly impactful is its specific focus on stakeholder engagement: even as a group of Puerto Ricans advocating to other Puerto Ricans, the organization focuses primarily on building requisite levels of trust to discuss these topics.
Eddie Guerra, a Structural Engineer and Jesabel Rivera-Guerra, a Community and Public Health Strategist are the life and work partners leading this initiative. At the end of March I organized a call with them to ask about how they met, what led them to begin this project, and why they think nuclear is an appropriate technology for Puerto Rico.
So I’d like to start out with your backgrounds. Where did you grow up in Puerto Rico and how did you meet?
Jesabel: I grew up in Bo. San Felipe in Rio Piedras (part of San Juan). It’s a small and what we call today vulnerable community, but also a resilient community. I was raised by my grandma who was a community organizer and would bring in politicians and decision-makers to make sure that her community was well-served. I had no idea that I’d end up doing what she was doing. At the time I wanted to be a doctor because everybody wants to be a doctor, so I did my undergrad in microbiology at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez (UPRM), which is where I met Eddie during my fourth year. At the time I was president of the UPRM chapter of The Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science. I went to this public speaking and technical writing workshop that was going on at the university that I thought sounded cool and that I could share with the students in my chapter. It was at the civil engineering department which is completely at the opposite side of the campus. There’s no way a biology person would be there whatsoever. But I went and the president of this organization who was offering this workshop was Eddie and that’s where we first met. We just started chatting about you know, our roles as presidents. That was October. And then we never saw each other — I mean we exchanged phone numbers just for the sake of professional work stuff. But then we saw each other again in December just hanging out in the streets. I bumped into Eddie and he said hi. I said hi. We went our separate ways again and then he sent me a message through Facebook: “Hey are you done with school?” It turns out it was the last day of his last semester. He was celebrating but I still had one more year to go and since that day we just kept talking every day. That was ten years ago.
Eddie: I grew up in a very small town in the mountains of Puerto Rico called San Sebastian. It’s one of those towns where everybody knows each other and it’s very self-sustained. My mom still runs a wedding business there, which I helped with on weekends during college. My grandpa was a barber and I have a lot of uncles and aunts there who were teachers, engineers, and total mathematic freaks. My family is also very Christian. I have uncles that are pastors. My grandpa was a pastor. My father was an English teacher and retired as one. My father is addicted to books and reading and was very strict on education. Every day at 3:00 p.m. he would sit down with me and my siblings, take out our notes and go through every subject. So I was very lucky that I had a father that had the time to do that. My mom was an entrepreneur that did a bachelor’s degree in nursing but after five years of practicing she said to hell with this I want to start my own business. I always saw this in my mom — this very go-getter entrepreneur. Growing up in Puerto Rico in the 90s there was a boom in infrastructure with things like the first urban train being developed — San Juan was booming. So I grew up with that vision of Puerto Rico as a modern society with a modern infrastructure and I was inspired to study civil engineering in Puerto Rico, which is where I met Jezebel and we started dating. Then I went to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for my masters in structural engineering with a specialty in steel design and earthquake engineering.
It’s funny how things work. Jesabel and I dated long distance for a year and on the day that I graduated from my masters, Jesabel got accepted into her masters at the University of Pittsburgh, four hours away. So we hopped on a bus from Bethlehem to Pittsburgh, looked for apartments there and settled down. I started a job with Rizzo International, a great firm that’s been doing civil engineering for nuclear for more than 30 years. That’s how I started doing civil engineering — specifically earthquake engineering and seismic designs for nuclear. During eight years in Pittsburgh we bought our first home and adopted our two boys — Yeriel and Jayden (5 and 7 y/o). And then life took us here to Houston recently where we are right now.
Jesabel: While we were in Pittsburgh Eddie was getting experience with structural engineering and nuclear specifically and I was finishing my masters in public health. I was specializing in community and behavioral interventions but I was also volunteering for the Latin American Cultural Union organization and immediately applying everything I was learning. It was interesting because I was changing the community’s perception of this organization and changing the perception of what the community knew about the Latino community in Pittsburgh. I started gaining all this experience with social justice and it’s why I consider myself knowledgeable in community engagement. I worked for a health insurance company, for the American Heart Association, and then a lot of other community projects. And now we’re in Houston and I’m dedicating most of my time to helping organizations like the Nuclear Alternative Project in community engagement — it’s one of those volunteering opportunities that you spend most of your time on.
So how did the Nuclear Alternative Project (NAP) come about?
Eddie: I’ve been designing and doing seismic risk assessments for nuclear power plants for over 10 years now. I did a lot of seismic design work including the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor building and then Fukushima happened and that took my career in a different path. I started doing seismic risk assessments for a lot of nuclear power plants on the east coast of the U.S. and I started to learn and realize wow existing nuclear plants are safer to seismic events than what I thought initially. I went through the engineering details, the safety margins in each of the components, the mechanical equipment. The redundancy of the traits and the safety systems and all of that put together — it’s really impressive.
In 2015/2016 I started to travel around the world consulting on seismic risk and I started to do some work with small modular reactors and there’s where I learned about the advances and uniqueness of advanced nuclear. Based on my work with SMRs and microreactors it seemed like they could be an option for Puerto Rico. So I started reaching out to the hundreds of Puerto Rican-born engineers working in the US nuclear industry with emails that basically said it’s time to go to Puerto Rico and start talking with people about this. The whole spectrum of stakeholders should know about this.
So our small group became a core group of people, but we were all a bunch of nerds and engineers — we knew how a plant operates and how safe it was and we were all pumped up and fired up to go to the people but we were missing the communication aspect, which Jesabel can explain. Basically I’m the luckiest engineer on earth and I’m married to an expert in community engagement. Jesabel has a background in microbiology and then her masters is in public health and she has a certification in emergency preparedness so her entire career has been dedicated to serving as that middle point for stakeholders. We needed the same type of help and Jesabel became the architect for messaging to the communities in Puerto Rico.
Jesabel: You have to imagine the early beginnings of this idea and what eventually became NAP. Just imagine this household where half of the dinner table is covered in papers on seismic activity and probabilistic risk assessments and then the other side is all this work on community health. At that point I was working on a project to help immigrants and newcomers to navigate the health care system in Pittsburgh. We’re working on these different projects and I’m hearing him at the dining table having all these discussions with all this fancy jargon and ideas for how they were going to say this and that to the community. And I was on the other side of the table making comments like really? Do you think people are going to stand there and listen to this? I don’t even understand what you’re talking about. Do you even realize where people are at? So I’m over here throwing shade and of course Eddie was like well why don’t you just help us? At that moment I didn’t even know how I would help and I had no idea what nuclear was. So the conversation turned to me asking all the same questions that most people have. What about safety? What about waste? Why do we need nuclear when we have solar and wind and renewables? Eddie was responding with science and examples from his work and I start trying to find information on my own to prove him wrong.
That’s how you got involved?
That’s how I started. So I’m finding all this information and raising questions like what would happen if this happened? and then I started to confirm what I’m finding in the literature with what Eddie was saying. I’m finding all the pros and the cons but the cons did not make sense to me. So I realized wait a second — the information that’s out there is just using a language that is not getting to people. So I remember being at that same dining table and saying you know what I’m going to help you with this.
So we start working together and then Hurricane Maria happens. And my main question was oh my gosh — what would have happened if we had an advanced reactor in Puerto Rico during Maria? I was expecting Eddie to say well we would have responded this way, we would have to prepare that way, and do all this different emergency response and mitigation. But his answer was we could still have electricity. The hospitals could still have electricity. And that shocked me because a lot of people say the problem in Puerto Rico was not the energy source, it was the energy transmission. But now I’m imagining what could happen if a hospital had access to a micro reactor. It would have saved tons of lives if we had had that. This is when I realized that this all comes down to public health. If we had an energy source that could overcome everything that happened in Puerto Rico, we would have saved lives.
What became a priority was figuring out how to deliver this message in a way that doesn’t sound like propaganda or like an infomercial that’s just telling people, here’s the information in the same exact way that we found it. So now we’re showing others the science by telling them about the experience of other countries that have nuclear and the positive impacts it’s had. We’re not going around saying “nuclear is the best” — what we want is a good energy source and we’re just finding ways to present information to people so they can be analytical about it. When we started, people were like “you guys are nuts. This is a one-hundred-by-thirty-five mile island — do you want to break Puerto Rico in half?”. That was March 2018. And now a year later people are telling us “this is too good to be true.” Just one year later. That’s a huge change that we’ve been experiencing.
NAP is 100% volunteer. Funds come from members and subscribers. We don’t have any marketing campaign or anything. And then this week I was at Nuclear Innovation Week (thanks to recommendations from Suzy Baker at ThirdWay) talking about how we’d been engaging and educating communities. At the same time there was a group talking about how this white paper that Eddie wrote should be a model for advocating for nuclear. And at that SAME time in Puerto Rico there’s this interview with the mayor of San Sebastian (where Eddie is from) and they were talking about something else but the interviewer started with before I ask about anything else how is this nuclear initiative going? So these three things are happening at the same time but there’s no campaign, there’s no marketing, there’s no anything — but that means that the message that we’re giving and the way that we’re giving it, is really getting to people. And I think that’s because we’re focusing on the truth.
This brings me to my next question because that’s exactly what I’m curious about. How have your experiences informed Nuclear Alternative Project’s communication strategy? Clearly you’re introducing people to information that they were not aware of but how do you do that in a way that’s genuine? And the second half of that question is about some of the public hearings and forums in Puerto Rico that you’ve been invited to: how have those played out?
Jesabel: So our whole approach began with this social media chat where we had our team on three platforms at the same time and we just started the conversation on nuclear and asking people questions.
Puerto Ricans especially?
Jesabel: Puerto Ricans especially but we wanted to see who was on what platform and who we were reaching out to. One thing that I’ve learned through my experience is that you need to meet people where they are. So that was the moment where we were just trying to figure out where people were and we got a lot of great information. We had a Google Hangout conversation where most of the people were super experts on nuclear — like Baby Boomer and Generation Xers and then everybody that was on Twitter were the organizations and the advanced nuclear vendors and then on Facebook we had the people of Puerto Rico. So we realized that you have all the vendors putting great things up on Twitter but the people of Puerto Rico were not hearing that. We wanted to figure out how to bridge the gap and try out people’s knowledge and see what types of questions people had.
So we started putting out additional articles and videos and people had comments and we would comment back and have conversations. We started getting all this information and after that we went to Puerto Rico in October, 2018. While we were there we were talking to everybody. I remember the host at the hotel got a little bit nervous because he saw the name of our group and was like oh my god this is some nuclear something — what are you doing here? So I just said, “This is who we are, this is what we’re trying to do, why do you react like this?” And then he started telling me all this stuff and 30 minutes later he said “well I really hope that you’re able to get this information but please don’t screw us up.”
So it’s all about these sincere, genuine types of conversations for engaging people and figuring out how to get this to more people and scale it while keeping the story short. Every time we go into a conversation with a piece of information we try to address a particular thought that is out there in the cloud and then we go back to see where we’re at now.
Very cool. So what was the occasion for these public hearings?
Eddie: Our trip to Puerto Rico in October 2018 was our first educational trip. I published this position paper through the Department of Commerce with the support of the nuclear industry that includes an ask for the leadership in Puerto Rico to consider a feasibility study of SMRs and micro reactors for the island. The objective of this trip was to follow up on that position paper and get their take on it. The leadership in Puerto Rico presented some feedback and we met specifically with Gabriel Rodríguez Aguiló, who is the majority speaker at the house of Puerto Rico. This ultimately led to the introduction of a resolution in the House of Puerto Rico for a viability study for nuclear in Puerto Rico. So that made a lot of news, like the World Nuclear News had an article about this, The New York Times.
The resolution gets passed: 37 votes in favor to only 1 against and so we organize some public hearings. At the end of February there were four organizations invited to those public hearings: the College of engineers from Puerto Rico, which is responsible for regulating the practice of engineering in Puerto Rico; PREPA, the Puerto Rican electric utility, Puerto Rico Energy Commission (PREC), the electricity regulator; and NAP. All of them raised questions and concerns but the message at the end was unanimous: We don’t know about the nuclear industry so it’s not fair for the government of Puerto Rico to accept or ban nuclear energy. The overall assessment was that we need to study this further. The government commission leading that public hearing then released a partial report a week later that said they are open to the discussion and want to keep exploring. And that they want to stay informed on NAP’s feasibility study.
Jesabel: While the hearing was happening in February we were also analyzing what people and the news were saying online and engaging with them. We were addressing all these different rumors and myths and other things that could eventually snowball. We were just stopping it right there with information. So it really helped to prevent people from getting lost in any fallacies.
That’s really important. So when you’ve been physically in the room with people who might be for your work or against it or not sure yet — what’s that like? What’s the environment like in those settings?
Jesabel: It’s been very respectful. When we went to Puerto Rico in October 2018, we came with some advanced nuclear vendors (NuScale, Westinghouse, GE Hitachi, Xenergy, and the United Nuclear Industry Alliance) and it really looked like an infomercial but that was inevitable. There were activists present and they were asking really good questions but they were also asking historical questions, like how do I know that the waste management is going to benefit Puerto Rico? And the reason they’re asking this is not to know more about the technology but because historically there have been other companies like coal that said they knew how to manage the waste but in the end they contaminated everything and left.
So there were genuine questions based on past experiences for Puerto Rico.
Yes. So it was very important for us to understand the background of the questions because then we were able to clarify things: while the vendor was answering the technology question we were answering the historical question. The conversation was really respectful.
I spoke with some local advocates in New England who recently went to publicly testify in favor of the Seabrook license extension. One of the advocates told me that one group of anti-nuclear protesters has called for 22 public hearings about the same issue regarding the license extension but keeps saying that the process isn’t transparent enough. It’s refreshing to hear about your experience in that you’re all at the table with the same motivations and can speak openly and respectfully with each other.
Jesabel: We’re not doing this because we want to convince people. We’re doing this because we really want to understand where they’re coming from. And we really want to hear their arguments. That’s it. Of course some people are saying that there are bigger agendas that we’re either working for or naive about but those are things that we cannot change. And we don’t intend to. The goal is to really understand what’s going through their minds and how we can continue to be part of this conversation.
So my next question is on that point exactly. Who has been the most receptive to your work, where have you gotten the most pushback, and how do you collaborate? What type of work do you do in order to expand and bring more people into the project?
Jesabel: We’re continuing to look for collaboration and have more conversations on the island. We initially reached out to an organization called Casa Pueblo, which is working up in the mountains in Adjuntas, in the center of Puerto Rico. They’re a solar hub in this town and after Maria they were the ones responding to this and helping people to get their solar panels. We reached out to them but they’re not interested in anything that isn’t renewable. And that’s fine — we just keep knocking on doors.
We’ve been privileged however to have this conversation with the National Institute of Energy and Sustainability for the Caribbean (INESI — Instituto Nacional de Energía y Sostenibilidad Isleña de la UPR). It’s academic-based and represents the University of Puerto Rico and they’re bringing together social equity and energy. They’re having all these different conversations and it’s very multidisciplinary in terms of who is leading this and who’s engaged. They’ve opened their doors to start the conversation and bring us to the table. I consider that a privilege because usually this is not what they do with organizations like us. Because of them we’ve had other doors open for us.
I was reading an article recently about the Puerto Rico legislature passing a 100% renewable energy target and I’d like to know what you think about that. I’d also like to hear your thoughts about one particular comment that said “Puerto Rico is the perfect test case for renewable micro grids.” It’s wrong to treat anyone’s home as a “test case” for anything but arguably this is what Nuclear Alternative Project is suggesting as well — you all think this is an appropriate location to introduce a new technology. Since Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico is going to continue redesigning and rebuilding its grid in a lot of new ways so I’m curious how you balance innovation with experience.
Eddie: No one wants their hometown to be a test case, but we also see things in a very different way. NAP represents the diaspora of hundreds of Puerto Rican engineers working in the U.S. nuclear industry with this talent and this how-to knowledge. We want to create industry in Puerto Rico that is aligned with our vision of a Puerto Rico that has a dynamic economy and modern infrastructure. We don’t believe from a technical and engineering point of view that renewables alone can sustain that vision.
There are two visions right now in Puerto Rico and we’ll be witnessing a sad battle of ideologies in the next couple years that NAP will be in the middle of. On one side you have these politicians calling for 100% renewable and saying that should be the vision of Puerto Rico. And on the other side you have the industry and businesses who have already developed an Integrated Resource Plan being prepared by Siemens and it’s completely opposite to the vision of 100% renewable: They’re positioning natural gas as a core generation asset for Puerto Rico.
But with regards to the new law, it’s important to realize that today it’s 2019, 2–3% of today’s power generation in Puerto Rico comes from renewable sources, and the law calls for 40% renewable by 2025. Just to put things in perspective: in 2010 the vision of Puerto Ricans by the leadership was to take Puerto Rico from 1% renewable in 2010 to 20% by 2015. It’s 2019 today and we’re stuck with 3%. So I’m not against the idea of renewables but if the numbers don’t make sense then that’s a problem.
We’re committed to our message. And in the end we’ll see whether 100% renewable is applicable or not and whether it’s practical. We should focus on what options are out there that can take us to zero emissions and we’re confident that nuclear will be part of that.
Jesabel: I just want to reiterate that we’re focused on what makes sense but we’re also focused on what people really want. They want reliability, they want sustainability, they want energy independence, they want all these different things. We’re learning today from other countries that there are unintended consequences of trying to achieve 100% renewable that don’t necessarily take people to where they want. We will continue to fight for what people really want while figuring out what the mix of energy sources to get us there will ultimately look like. That’s why we can say that we’ll continue to fight to include nuclear in that mix.
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For your ears (one for each):
Youtube: SYLVIA REXACH Y TUTI UMPIERRE — Olas Y Arenas (1958)
Born and raised in Santurce Puerto Rico, Sylvia Rexach was a comedy scriptwriter, poet, singer and composer of boleros. During World War II she dropped out of college to join the U.S. Army as a member of the Women Army Corps Service. Rexach’s compositions have been recorded by a wide range of artists and in 2001, she was posthumously inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame.
Spotify: Buscabulla — Buscabulla EP
Music project of Puerto Rican designer and Brooklyn resident, Raquel Berrios and Luis Alfredo Del Valle. Tripped-out indie synth grooves with heavy influences from vintage Latin music that combine to create compositions of “a mellow Caribbean sensibility with subversive wit.”
