The Progress Report: The World Bank Goes Nuclear

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Emma Varvaloucas: Hi everybody, and welcome to The Progress Report, which is The Progress Network’s Weekly roundup of all the good news that you might have missed during the week. We like to think of it as a palate cleanser to end your week, especially after a deluge of everything that, is going wrong in the world, landing in your inboxes and on your social media feeds and in your ears, and anywhere else where you normally receive your news.

This is just a way to end your week on a more positive, uplifting, and hopeful note, I am flying solo today. Zachary is not with us as he is traveling, but he’ll be back with us next week and we still have a great roundup of good news for you. I’m going to dive right into it with the semi controversial, change in policy

Upcoming change in policy from the World Bank around nuclear energy. it remains a clean, green, safe option for energy and one that World Bank policy does not allow funding for. the World Bank funds a lot of accessible energy projects in poorer countries, places like Indonesia, Vietnam, and they’ll do so for a variety of affordable and renewable energy projects.

But not for nuclear. However, they are actually considering changing this policy. The head of the World Bank has asked the board to reconsider, and they’re thinking that there’s going to be a policy reform in an upcoming proposal in 2026. So this is not immediate, but it would be a big deal.

Asian nations are showing interest in nuclear for the first time. the Philippines is aiming to have its first nuclear power plant by 2032. Vietnam is considering a plan. Indonesia is also putting together a government committee to create a strategy to build a full scale nuclear power plant. if the World Bank changes their policy around this, they could unlock crucial funding.

The World Bank has only financed one nuclear project in its entire lifetime. a plant in southern Italy in 1959. we’ll keep you posted about that,

Let’s move away from talking about nuclear energy and talk a little bit about cancer. for the very first time, an American man has received an experimental transplant of sperm producing stem cells.

this is interesting, important, and potentially life changing for this man. this person is a survivor of childhood cancer, we have, a fairly high survival rate for childhood cancer. These days. around 85%, which might be a lot higher than people were expecting to hear.

Some people who are diagnosed with cancer when they’re younger, they’re able to, put away eggs or sperm and save that for future use. But if you’re diagnosed quite young, often you’re not able to do that, and radiation or chemotherapy can leave you infertile. one option now is taking a small testicular sample from these patients when they are young, banking that away, and then.

Re-injecting, some of the cells from that tissue sample that contain sperm producing stem cells. this happened for the first time in the states, recently. A team in Belgium was the first in January, and there’s no guarantee that this.

Going to work. In fact, we are not going to know if it’s going to work for quite some time. And it might not be clear because a lot of the standard tests to see if somebody is producing sperm is not gonna work in this particular situation. So again, one of those scientific advancements where it’s gonna take time, we have to wait and see, but the fact that they’re opening up new avenues is.

Fantastic. it could be a life changer for this person and he might be the first of many childhood cancer survivors to be able to have children, after a lifetime of thinking that they couldn’t. So we’ll keep an eye on that. Certainly. Very interesting. what scientists. And surgeons are able to accomplish these days and just keeps on getting wilder and wilder

I wanted to mention a study that examines breast cancer mortality rates in Europe and forecasted those rates into 2025. They believe that those rates are going to continue To drop into 2025, which is great news generally speaking, most people.

think breast cancer is on the rise, and it’s certainly no untrue. The incident incidents of breast cancer is up in part because the population is growing, the population is aging. We’re getting much better at screening for it. So more cases are identified, but along with better screening also comes better diagnosis and treatment.

And so the breast cancer mortality rates have been steadily dropping, and even though breast cancer was the focus of the study, I also wanted to highlight one, particular number from it that really blew my mind, which is that the authors concluded that 6.8 million cancer cases, and that’s all cancer, not just breast cancer.

have been averted in Europe, since 1989. So that is fantastic. I feel like something that people are completely unaware of because most of the time when you see headline news about cancer, it’s about how it’s much more common, which again is true. The population is growing, the population is aging.

We are getting much better at saving people from cancer, and I wish people knew that story a little bit more. Moving on from there, I think Zachary asked in a recent episode. Has everything that Trump has done so far bad Has he done anything that we can applaud And, this is not an apology for Trump, but I did swear to myself that if Trump did something that we found to be progress, we would highlight it, in the progress report, specifically on the progress network in general.

So I did wanna highlight one of the thing that he was working on with all people, kid Rock. If that brings you any bang, bang, references in your head like me. I dunno if that’s a good or a bad thing, that is because Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at ending ticket price gouging.

this is actually something where I understand this is not gonna be life changing for many people, but it is a bipartisan issue because he’s building on work, from the Biden administration. The order directs the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission to work with Pam Bondi, who is our attorney general to ensure competition laws are. In the concert and entertainment industry, ticket sales go live. There are bots that then buy these tickets and mass, and that means that they can then turn around and resell them at much higher rates. the story that probably everyone is familiar with now is the Taylor Swift Eras tour, which, you know, the tickets originally went on sale for, hundreds of dollars.

And then people, were purchasing them for. Tens of thousands of dollars, after bots jumped in and bought a bunch of tickets. So again, just in a, in a strange era that we are in with the fact that Kid Rock extensively quoted in this article about fixing ticket price gouging.

Where I’m getting my information from on CNN, the fact that Kid Rock is working with the president, just odd, but can’t really complain about it because at the end of the day, I would also love for artists to be able to offer cheaper tickets because they are not, being. Unscrupulously bought by these companies that have bots in play.

So not exactly an issue that, is going to be altering the trajectory of the world, but it is something positive. We will see what, Pam Bondi ends up doing with this and ends up, putting it into place. But again, it is one of those rare instances of bipartisan consensus. The Justice Department last year filed a lawsuit along with 30 state and district’s attorney generals.

there was an antitrust lawsuit they filed against Ticketsaster’s, parent company, Live Nation, and, Trump is, building on that. Yes, there is at least one thing from the Biden administration that Trump is building on. So that is our roundup of good news for the week. Try to hit on a bunch of different, topics and realms in that roundup.

Our lives going to be dramatically altered tomorrow. Probably not, but we would all do ourselves a favor to pay a little bit more attention to things that are going on in the world that are pushing us ever so slowly in a positive direction. I hope that we can deliver at least some kernel of positivity for you at the end of what might be a very long week.

Thank you as always for listening. Thank you as always to the Podglomerate for producing this show and for the staff at The Progress Network who were being unnamed per request on the progress report, but do the integral work of finding all of these, stories for us and letting us bring them to you. So thanks to them.

Thanks to you. I can’t thank Zachary this time ’cause he’s not here, but we’ll thank him again next week and we’ll see you all next week as well.