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This is Fossil vs Future, a warm conversation between generations on climate change.
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Each podcast episode will be focusing on a different climate-related challenge, as godfather and goddaughter, James and Daisy, share their individual experiences and perspectives, with the hope of fostering understanding between generations.
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James is at the later stage of his working life dedicated to dealing with climate change, through law, finance, and social entrepreneurship, and Daisy is at an earlier stage of her career, equally focused on the climate and how to drive systemic change through her experience in the finance, business, and non-profit sectors.
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We want to use intergenerational dialogue as a tool to learn, inspire, and get stuff done!
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Hello and welcome back to Fossil vs. Future, our podcast which is an intergenerational conversation about climate. I'm Daisy. I'm James. And today the question we're asking is, what about nuclear? It's a question that I've been asked many times, often provocatively, often to try and put me in a box I didn't want to go into.
And it produces a whole series of answers to the question that might reveal a difference between generations. So, should we start with a bit of an introduction to what is Nuclear energy. Please. Nuclear energy is energy from the nucleus, the core of an atom. There are two types of reaction that can harness this energy.
Nuclear fusion, which the technology is still in the R& D phase, and nuclear fission, which is used around the world today to produce electricity. During nuclear fission, a neutron collides with an atom, usually a uranium atom, and splits it, releasing energy in the form of heat and radiation. More neutrons are then released when the atom splits and these continue to collide with other uranium atoms and the process repeats itself again and again.
This is called a nuclear chain reaction. Inside a nuclear reactor, the heat generated warms a cooling agent, usually water, and this produces steam. The steam then turns turbines that drives generators to create electricity. Nuclear power accounts for about 10 percent of electricity generation globally, rising to almost 20 percent in some advanced economies.
Nuclear energy produces nearly zero greenhouse gas emissions. and therefore has significant potential to contribute to the decarbonization of the power sector. In fact, nuclear is today's second largest source of low emissions power after hydropower. However, the byproduct of nuclear energy is radioactive material.
A collection of unstable nuclei and this waste can be harmful to humans and must be treated or conditioned to turn it into a safe, stable, and manageable form. And the wrist lasts a very, very, very long time because of the half life of those red euclides. And this is where I do think we have a an intergenerational difference.
My generation, certainly those who have had any kind of involvement in environment movement or who have simply been aware of the major incidents that have taken place, we discussed earlier that The Chernobyl incident, which had a significant effect on, on my career, I mean, it, it, it sent me in a direction towards international environmental law rather than other parts of international law.
I would say a strong majority of the opinion in that kind of cohort of people who cared about climate and environment would have been anti nuclear. And a lot of my early work as a barrister. was for Greenpeace on nuclear claims of one kind or another. I represented Greenpeace at the original Hinkley Point inquiry.
I represented Greenpeace in respect of the nuclear waste facility at Sellafield. I did loads of work looking at the kinds of You know, the legal arguments associated with, uh, the burying of waste, problems associated with nuclear liability, you know, all sorts of things that, that revealed actually a rather lazy and complacent industry that was hard to trust.
And you deal with all the evidence, particularly after Chernobyl and other nuclear accidents like Three Mile Island. There was a lot of material from which to form a view that this was a dangerous industry and that there must be better ways of producing electrons. And I think that's quite, it's quite a widely held view even amongst those who are not necessarily advocates for an environmental cause.
At the same time, I found that it was used against me by a certain type of challenger When I was younger, it was often an older man who wanted to box me into that box. So you care about climate, you must be part of the anti nuclear debate. So I'm going to challenge you. What about nuclear? I want to know what your views on nuclear are.
And if I was anti nuclear, I also got bracketed with other parts of perhaps the anti nuclear movement that was also anti nuclear weapons. So, there was a CND, ban the bomb movement attached to environmentalism. And so, if you were, if you were in a conversation about climate and you were asked what about nuclear, there was a tendency to push you into a left or, or a radical or a sort of, you know, radical.
Remnant hippie camp, right? And then that made a certain type of businessman of a certain age discard what you were about to say about climate. So I developed a response to that, because, believe me, I got asked, what about nuclear, a lot. And because I'd done all this work for Greenpeace, which was in a kind of anti nuclear campaign, I would make this point.
I would say, Actually, I don't have a lot of confidence in the industry itself. I think it's complacent, and part of the reason why it's complacent is because of its connection with the military use of nuclear power. It's been cosseted and protected. And I would always try and find a point of, at least, doubt in the mind of the questioner.
So you're, if you're very pro business and you're very pro competitiveness, this is a lazy, complacent, cosseted, protected industry because of its association with the military. Have you thought about that? But then I would have a standard answer to them, which is, I want to see the energy industry, the electricity sector in particular, move away from fossil fuels towards renewables.
And I'd read Professor Lovelock's book. On Gaia, and he's been, he was really clear that, uh, that if you wanted a transformation in the electricity world, you should combine nuclear with renewables, right? He was very clearly advocating that a long time ago, 30, 40 years ago. Wow. And I, I was persuaded by that.
So I used to say, look, I want to see the com, the combination. I'm not impressed. by Hinkley point type reactors, which by the way, use a hell of a lot of cement, that use a lot of other types of energy to make the thing itself. That's where the greenhouse gases come in. But they're big, they're unwieldy, they're very costly.
They use materials that can be diverted into, you know, into making weapons. I'm interested in small scale nuclear that can use alternative fuels that can fit with renewables in a distributed power system. When the industry comes up with those, I'll be more attracted to it. And at least that, that shut down the attempt to box me in a space I didn't want to go into, and it opened up a little bit of dialogue with the person who generally asked those questions in order to be negative about doing something about climate.
And I, because I, I really only ever talked. I was often younger than, you know, I first started teaching, I was younger than my students. And I, I had a student then who, who went on to be general counsel to a Canadian nuclear technology business called Terrestrial Energy. And one day he called me up and he said, remember me, I've just got on, got this role and wondered whether you'd like to advise us.
And I was really put on the spot. Would I advise, having done all this work for Greenpeace, would I advise a nuclear company? He said, you know, we do small scale reactors with alternative fuels. There we go. So I thought, oh, it's quite hard for me to say no. And it was an advisory role, I wasn't a fiduciary, but I took it.
I did, it was a few years ago now. Because I do think that we do need to keep nuclear in the suite of options and You can also, you can use small scale reactors to make, uh, industrial heat, for example, where, where renewables are not a, really, the right solution. And we need industrial heat to make things.
It's a very valuable resource. It's quite expensive. Very high carbon emissions from industrial heat. If we can use small scale reactors to make industrial heat, that's a good contribution, a good complement to renewables. We're probably going to have a I'm sure we are going to have a discussion about hydrogen, but I also think that you can make hydrogen with small scale reactors.
Uh, we have small scale reactors in nuclear submarines. My nephew's a submariner and he goes to sleep in a submarine with a nuclear reactor in it every night. Wow. It's not impossible to make units that can produce power, as you say. You could separate, by the way, the nuclear reaction from the turbine. in ways that, you know, limit the risk of something catastrophic happening.
These are all design features of modern small scale reactors. So I do, I do see potential for nuclear to contribute to a modern distributed clean energy system that can help us transition away from fossil fuels. And another way that it can complement renewables is when the wind isn't blowing, when the sun's not shining, we can turn up nuclear, we can turn down nuclear, depending on the renewables that we have available, I think.
Generally speaking, nuclear is offered as a baseload power. Just the time when we're beginning to learn as we add more storage to our system and more generation, and as our networks, our grids become more sophisticated, that the concept of baseload is probably going to fade into irrelevance. Still relevant today in most grids, but everything that's set out on the table in front of us for the future energy system communicates a message that we have to rethink what baseload is.
It's really to do with a wide range of supply with storage built in and with digital demand side management to make a more efficient connection between supply and demand in real time across an economy. We have all of those technologies. We don't necessarily have the right regulatory framework for putting them all together efficiently and that's a task for, well, frankly, the next government here needs to resolve that because the We will get to net zero a whole lot quicker the moment we resolve how we manage our grid.
So I don't, I don't want personally to see nuclear offered as a baseload solution around which renewables contribute. I don't like that model. I'd like to see nuclear in a system that is designed around distributed power. Including small scale reactors. As you heard, I'm not attracted to the, the, the huge, great push power.
stations. I just don't think that. I think that's an old system. It's old technology. We've got better nuclear technology now than that, and it's at lower cost, and it can be delivered to where it's needed. Personally, I'd be quite happy putting a small scale nuclear reactor in an industrial estate to generate industrial heat, but you need to persuade people that that's going to be okay.
I mean, there will be a reaction. What's interesting is there might not be a reaction, a negative reaction from your generation. Am I right? It's interesting that you said when you said you worked in climate that you were put in the anti nuclear camp because I think for my generation if you work in climate you're more likely to be in the pro nuclear camp because of the fact that it is zero emissions, the air pollution is minor in comparison.
I think in my experience people that work in climate are more Nuclear. Now, that offers encouragement to the, the innovation that's taking place in nuclear. Because for, I mean, a long period of time, you could not get a new nuclear design through a regulatory process. And often we had, you know, countries that just said no nuclear at all.
Germany, for example, after the Japanese reactor that, um, was hit by the tsunami, Fukushima, you know, just said, right, well, we're going to stop. You know, not entirely, but, you know, very nearly shut down the, the whole industry. It's been very difficult to get the necessary evolution of those nuclear systems through quite serious political barriers in many parts of the world.
Very few new reactors have been built, and the ones that have been, have been massively over, over cost. I think I saw that Hinkley is going to be 30, 35 billion or something? I mean, think what you could do with that. I mean, it's a bad story of wastage, and poor design, and old models, and, and the nuclear industry really, really does need to up its game.
But maybe because of your generation's attitude, state of mind, approach to it, uh, you'll, you'll get that. I think we are still cautious. I definitely don't think we're running towards nuclear as a fix all solution, but I think most of my friends would agree that it should be part of a solution. Yeah, I would still argue that I would prefer, prefer much, much more attention to be paid to building an energy system.
A network, a grid, a way of combining these different technologies, than more effort on one particular type of generation, do you know what I mean? We have, a lot of our debate has been, is it nuclear, or is it renewables, or is it actually, let's really concentrate on the infrastructure, the system, the software, the digitization of the system is critical.
critical if we're going to manage it better, moving electrons around, trading. We haven't really explored yet the capacity for peer to peer trading or sharing of energy, which we know we can do now. One of, one of the enterprises I've been involved with did the first example of a peer to peer energy trading or sharing system with renewable energy solar power on a housing estate in Hackney.
Right, with a government grant. You know, solar PV on the roof, storage in the tower blocks, and we had 50 flats that had a Verve box connected, and you put the washing machine on, and it would order up the power from the Solar PV, or from the storage, and you create a system without a utility, and move power, share power around those 50 apartments.
We've proved that it was possible to do that with, you know, very much first generation technology. I mean, it'll get better, obviously, over time. Well, if we can do that, then we know we can have multiple, so every rooftop, right, can generate power. All sorts of surfaces we've got that we can generate power, but we don't yet have the software systems, although they are being created, I know.
We haven't pulled it all together. So I'd like more effort put into the system design and infrastructure deployment and all of that work that needs to be done to make the parts fit together efficiently than more money directed to a single type of generation like nuclear. I've been involved with uh, A start up called Verve from the beginning and Verve has a technology that really works on the same sort of technology as voice recognition to pick up signals in a power system.
That kind of technology which allows you to sample data very, very fast coupled with the ability to store power and the ability to generate it on a rooftop. That's a system that can be made, self sufficient as it were, I mean you can, you can generate and share power in a community, say. You can build a kind of, what gets called a mini grid, around the use of those technologies.
Provided, You have the right software that they can all communicate with each other. You could create the right records and see who, who's using what, when. Actually, our bills are often pretty rudimentary when we get them from the utility. Very much guesstimates. We could do that more accurately now. So I would like more effort put into those sorts of technologies to build a better system than over concentrating on one type of generation.
such as nuclear. And I would expect the nuclear industry of the future to design their technology, the application of their technology, the generation, the generators themselves, so that they fit within that distributed system, rather than selling us large, outdated, push power systems. But we will still need nuclear as part of our net zero solution, even if we make all those improvements on the demand side more locally?
That's a more challenging question. I think that might depend where you are in the world and what sort of power demands you have and what other means you have to reduce demand. But in a, in a, in a very energy hungry economy, probably, that would be my resting point on Nuclear, I wouldn't, definitely don't want to rule it out, want to see it contribute to a distributed power system that's more robust and more secure.
Would very much like to see, there was an announcement today actually about a, an alternative nuclear fuels business that had received some public money. Again, to avoid dependencies, a bit like the critical minerals discussion of imported uranium from Russia. Because that's another, I mean, there is a connection, obviously, between the minerals discussion and nuclear, because of the need for uranium.
We've got uranium in some places that we get on well with, like Australia, uh, large amounts of uranium there. Interesting that that's a very big political debate in Australia, with a generational difference of view. About, uh, the mining of uranium for nuclear power. Okay. That's an interesting complexity because there's been some pretty ugly history of the mining of uranium.
And I even remember in my early days as a barrister representing a guy, Mr. Connolly, who was recruited by RTZ in London and was sent off to Namibia to work in the Rossing uranium mine, where he worked on a maintenance bit, as a maintenance fitter on one of those massive grates. earth munching bits without proper safety equipment and came back to Glasgow with cancer and then found that RTZ were not interested in his claim for compensation and sent him back to Namibia.
Anyway, long story short, companies can be really cruel and really brutal and they overuse their, their corporate lawyers, protect them from responsibility through limited liability companies and I really don't like it. We were eventually successful in that case I'm proud to say and I but I've done a few cases against in the my days against mining and mineral businesses that behaved appallingly and and the uranium business is pretty pretty rough and So you you've Those supply chain issues matter for the nuclear industry.
Where, where's the material come from? Interestingly, some of the modern small scale reactors, including the terrestrial energy one I mentioned before, can use spent nuclear fuel. Which is interesting, because that's a kind of use of the waste, right? Which is, let's face it, a very expensive long term liability on the country.
If you look at the budget of our Department of Environment, I'm telling you, a lot of it is earmarked for managing nuclear waste. Really? Right? There's a lot less left in the budget for doing all the things you would think our environment department would be doing every day that they don't do because they haven't got any money because it's all going to nuclear waste.
Really. So, I mean, if you can use, if you can use nuclear waste to make nuclear fuel today that is usable in small scale reactors, that's a, That's a good thing. And we move nuclear waste around the planet with, you know, high risk. We are one of those countries that moves nuclear waste in and out. We process other people's waste and we move our own waste to other places.
And that's a, that's quite a dangerous exercise. And we move waste across oceans that are often, you know, sometimes not well Shall we say, um, not transparently communicated to the countries that we go through. I remember going to a Caribbean environment minister's meeting many years ago in Kingston, Jamaica to talk about climate change and why we should have a treaty on climate change in the very early days of building the alliance of small island states.
And there was a presentation at that meeting by Greenpeace that, where they had tracked nuclear transport going through the Caribbean that was unmarked and the ministers from these countries had no idea that they were passing through the, you know, through their, past their islands. And there's an awful lot of unpleasantness and stupidity that goes on in managing risk associated with the materials that go into the nuclear industry that you'd, you'd really would like to see better dealt with.
Anyway, all in all, yeah, the answer to the challenge is that I, I would, I would like to see small scale reactors, especially using alternative fuels, if they can use waste, terrific, but I'd like to see them as a complement to a largely renewable base. system where there's sufficient storage in that system and where we are super efficient at connecting supply and demand.
And we take use of, make use of all of the abilities that we have in pretty much every, certainly every urban community, I would say that, well, maybe that's not a distinction. I'm just thinking that surfaces, if you've got, you've got the ability to generate your own power and store it and distribute it and increasingly use an electric vehicle to store as well, because they're quite big batteries.
And they're underutilized. Again you need software to join those digital parts together. And then, then you start to have these more efficient closed loop systems. That's a more robust and more secure way of delivering power. If we do implement small scale reactors, presumably that means more smaller nuclear sites.
Yep. How does that work from a safety perspective? Yeah. I know. Rather than just having one. Well, I mean. Yeah. You've, you've looked at the stats, right, the safety stats for nuclear as compared to other forms of generation, right? They are really revealing, aren't they? Yeah, I would really recommend Our World in Data, Hannah Ritchie's, um, data website.
It was, um, I read their page on nuclear and it says how fossil fuels kill so many more people per unit of electricity than nuclear, and nuclear energy results in 99. 9 percent fewer deaths than brown coal, and 99. 8 percent fewer deaths than coal, 99. 7 percent fewer deaths than, yeah. So there's that, but we still have a perception of risk that's way out of whack.
You'd like to think those facts would be conclusive, but we know they're not. So there's a lot of persuading to do. And that's probably why I use the example of my nephew, Freddie, who's a submariner, right? I'm not worrying about him. I mean, it's a hell of a life being a submariner, but I'm not worrying about him sleeping next to a nuclear reactor.
But people do. People will worry about a nuclear reactor coming into an industrial state or, you know, quite frankly, you could put a nuclear reactor in a, in a large building in the city, but you would get a reaction to that. People would, would worry. Definitely. So you've got to, you've got to overcome that.
You can't force that on people. The reason why I mentioned an industrial estate is that I think people would feel more comfortable, more accepting of a small scale reactor going into an industrial estate that was manufacturing something. Not next door to where they're living and sleeping. Now there's some, there's a little bit of hypocrisy involved in that, you know, I don't mind him dying.
Um, but you know, we've got to confront the fact that there will be a perception of risk that has to be really dealt with persuasively and authoritatively. But the facts are pretty clear. And I would be perfectly comfortable putting a small scale nuclear reactor in an industrial state, making industrial heat, and I would be happy to have the debate.
But if in the end it's absolutely rejected, you've got to go with that. I mean, it's people, you can't force people, some countries can force people, let's face it, but we don't live in that environment. We do accept that people can legitimately complain about something and express their fears, even if they're not wholly rational.
I think a fear around the safety is also in unstable regions of the world, in areas where Wars are going on near to these nuclear reactors. I think there is a lot of fear around that and what the consequences could be if Yeah. No, I, I think the, the possibility of a, of a, you know, a dirty bomb being made from plutonium that otherwise might go into a nuclear reactor or Yes, those are real risks.
Of course they are. They're geopolitical risks of a kind that we have to be very, very attentive to. And they're a reason not to over depend on nuclear. I wouldn't make nuclear the center of my energy system. I mean, perhaps the clearest, the closest example is France. There are some other factors worth bearing in mind.
Nuclear power, especially large scale nuclear power, needs a lot of water, a lot of coolant. I mean, that's becoming an issue, much as it is actually with, um, hydro. With climate change. Yeah, with climate change. Unreliable supply of water. Also, nuclear reactors get shut down if the water temperature gets too high.
We often get these Complaints about renewables being unreliable or intermittent. Man, when you shut down a nuclear reactor, it doesn't do anything, right? Right. And recently, we've had more and more incidents, particularly in France, actually, of nuclear reactors being shut down because the water they're taking in is cool and it's too warm.
The river is too warm that they're extracting water to. It's remarkable, but that is a reality. And you need to factor that in as well. It's another reason why I don't buy the nuclear as baseload argument anymore. I think that's changing for other reasons, but there is a form, a weird form of intermittency associated with nuclear power.
It's quite sporadic, it's quite rare, but it happens. The other thing that's striking about, you know, a nuclear power based system is that sometimes you find that They're in geologically unstable areas. That's not very smart, to have a nuclear reactor on a fault line. And one of the things that was interesting about Fukushima is that the harm that was caused was caused by the tsunami sweeping through the facility.
The facility was, you know, remarkably robust. But it was the water that carried away the radionuclides. So, yeah, nuclear reactors in regions that have tsunamis, it's a bit of a risk. But anyway, these are all factors to figure out how best to combine technologies. And I do think we've, we've hit upon an intergenerational difference that can be resolved productively With further innovation and with the reimagining of the energy system.
So I'm not persuaded that my, if you like, my generation of nuclear advocates have done enough to properly represent the benefit of their technology. I'm looking to see a sort of next generation. I want to see newer and better forms of nuclear. generation fit with a new system. Having said that, you mentioned Fusion is still in the R& D phase.
There have been advances recently in Fusion. Yeah, very exciting. Quite interesting, quite a significant advance in Oxford. The investment firm Capricorn, which is, I would say, one of the best investors in, in this, broadly speaking, what gets called the impact Space, but he is Capricorn's a bit bigger than most in that area.
And Capricorn invested in SpaceX and originally Tesla, they were, it was eBay money. It was the money that came out of the winnings of, of eBay. And Jeff Sch created one of his funds, it's called Capricorn. And Capricorn's been a really good and sophisticated investor over many years and they do deep research into their areas.
And there's a guy called Eon Yalu in, in New York, who, who has. Uh, a lot of effort into fusion, into thinking about how you make fusion a viable source of energy. And he's optimistic about it. I respect him enormously. I think he's got a lot to offer. His insights are very interesting. I'm perhaps a little bit more doubtful about when it arrives in a way that provides solution, and I don't want to depend upon it arriving.
But there's no doubt there have been advances in fusion in the last two or three years that show great promise. Yeah, that's one of the problems with nuclear power, I think, is the long lead times of building these things. And huge cost in building the big ones, huge cost. And in the meantime, we've got an awful lot of what we need.
That we just need to deploy. And many of the barriers to the deployment are not technical or technological. They're to do with politics and law and public acceptance and planning and half the difficulty. in getting stuff done is, is there, not in the technology. I mean, I, you know, I'm on one of the octopus boards and, you know, we want to deploy more and more of our resources in building more and more renewables and it's just slow.
And most of it's to do with grid connection and things that are, that are frustrating. I think that's one of the reasons that the UK anyway wants to roll out nuclear is the national security. implications and not having to Rely on fossil fuels again. It's compared comparing to the business as usual if we don't have to Energy security.
Sorry, I should have said rather than national security Although they kind of go together. I mean the two securities three securities climate energy piece There's no doubt that most countries want some form of energy But by the way energy security is a is a perfectly reasonable concept energy independence Not so much I mean, you could tell it very much.
We have a more nuclear power in our system in the UK because of the interconnector with France, right? So we import quite a lot of nuclear power through that interconnector across the channel. And many people don't quite realize that, you know. We use our interconnectors quite a lot. Hydro from Norway, for example.
So we're even something like electrons moving through wires. Crosses borders all the time. So energy independence is not a very useful phrase. Politicians like it because it kind of feels macho and, you know, I mean, but that's not really very helpful. Security is a better phrase because then you can start thinking about where are my dependencies?
Where is fragility? Where am I vulnerable? How would I build up resilience? Security covers that quite well. And you can combine energy security, climate security. peace and security, you could build a reasonable strategy for an economy around those securities. And I'm quite happy for nuclear to be in that mix.
But again, I prefer to see it in a broadly distributed power system, not in a large scale push power system, which I think has its own vulnerabilities. You know, you can see how Russia has been attacking Ukrainian power systems constantly. Funnily enough, that that huge nuclear site, which has been attacked multiple times, but it's also been defended well, and they've even had, you know, there's an ambivalence that Russia has.
I don't think Russia really does want a massive nuclear explosion on their borders, but it does show vulnerability, you know, to have a dependency. I can tell you that when, hopefully, peace comes to Ukraine, Ukraine will rebuild its energy system in a very green and very digital way. They will not have a dependency on imported Russian anything.
And they're already a very digitally savvy and literate nation. They're remarkably advanced in many ways. They have, they have all their public records now in the cloud, which is incredible. We don't have that. I mean, you know, if you want to look up anything that's a, you know, any of your records, public records, it's a nightmare to do that here, but in Ukraine you can, you know, you have an account and you can look it up digitally.
That tells you that society, when they get the chance, will have a very different energy system and it will be clean and green and it will not be dependent on imported fossil fuels from Russia, or probably imported uranium from Russia. They actually have their own resources, a lot of mineral resources.
in Ukraine. Anyway, the point is that that's not the future. The future is, I mean, the fossil fuels are not the future for a place like Ukraine. Their future will be very different. And I don't know whether they will include small scale nuclear. Perhaps they will. Yeah. In summary, I think for our generation, for my generation, climate anxiety and the fear of climate change and the damages that that will bring is Greater than our fear of nuclear and nuclear power, and therefore my generation is more accepting to cautiously exploring nuclear as part of the solution.
Got it. Thank you so much for listening to Fossil Versus Future. Please subscribe to our podcast and give us a rating and please follow us on social media. Let us know the what about questions that you've been asked and anything that you'd like to discuss.