Nuclear Waste - What's the Solution?

Should we bury nuclear waste? Recycle it? Shoot it into space? We talk about the pros and cons of various solutions.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Pay there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says trash, don't
pick it up, take them lights away. I'm Jonathan Strickland,

(00:20):
I'm Lauren, and I'm Joe McCormick. So in our last podcast,
we talked about the problem of radioactive waste and how
it's a pretty serious one. It's one that we have
to lend serious consideration too, so that we can find
a solution that doesn't know or radiate people unnecessarily or
even necessarily. Yes, we talked about some of the waste

(00:43):
facilities that are currently in existence and the main kind
that we would really like to have that is currently
not in existent. So today I figured we'd take a
little more forward looking, uh look on the show called
Forward Thinking. Maybe a little more a forward glancing look,
a forward looking glance. How about we just sort of

(01:06):
explore the different options that may or may not be
open to us as far as dealing with nuclear waste. Right, Well,
let's do a little bit of recap on the last episode.
So one of the things we learned is that not
all nuclear waste is the same exactly. So the vast
majority of the nuclear waste that is produced, or radioactive

(01:27):
waste is what's called low level waste or intermediate level waste.
And this is about nineties seven percent of all nuclear
waste generated, but only five percent of the radioactivity. Right,
So what is this stuff? Well, it's stuff that's been
in contact with radioactive material and has picked up some
radioactivity because of that, either it's radioactive dust or the

(01:47):
radioactive material itself has started to cause some ionizing reactions.
So intermediate level waste tends to be stuff that's been
in contact with radioactive waste for a while, like filters,
parts of a reactor, this kind of thing. I think
that probably also stuff like like filings from uranium mills
fall into that general probably. Yeah, this gets kind of

(02:08):
weird because different countries classify things in slightly different ways.
But then low level waste would include stuff that's had
less intense contact with radioactive material but still has come
into contact with it. So tools, uh, protective clothing and gear,
that kind of thing that might fall into that category,
and we have to find ways to deal with all
of it. Yeah, these lower level wastes, they are still

(02:30):
somewhat radioactive, so we do have to be careful in
how we're dealing with them. Yeah, you don't want your
children to swallow them, right, so disposal, take that Take
that protective over you know, protective apron out of your mouth, Jimmy. Yeah, Well,
some gloves are more delicious than others, I guess. So anyway,
the low level waste is not all that dangerous. It's

(02:54):
not good, but it's it's not something it's not our
main concerns. It's the sort of stuff that we can
safely disposed of in uh in a essentially a trench
or pit and covered with with soil, and it will
be uh, it will be secure enough where we don't
have to worry about that affecting people. Yeah, I guess

(03:16):
the intermediate level waste is intermediate. But what comes after
intermediate high level waste, high level waste, that is what
is a big problem. Yeah, we're not talking about pants. No,
it's not a high level waste. It's not an eighties
genes kind of thing. Now, we're talking about waste that
is highly radioactive. This is the stuff that makes up

(03:37):
the radioactivity, even though it's only three percent of the
volume of waste. Yeah, So for the purpose of this podcast,
we might just say high level waste to include all
the things were about to mention. But some people make
a distinction between spent nuclear fuel and what they then
call high level waste. On top of that, high level
waste being what has been processed out of spent fuel. Yeah,

(03:59):
so if you get if you have spent fuel, yeah,
you have spent fuel, you do some reprocessing of it,
so you can recapture uranium and plutonium from that spin
fuel that have not been burned. Yeah, because as it
turns out, not very much of it gets consumed in
these nuclear reactors. It doesn't It doesn't take much for
a nuclear rod, for example, to become inefficient, so it's

(04:20):
no longer heating up water to the levels that we
needed to. But there's still plenty of uranium and plutonium
in there, and those are important resources. So if we're
able to reprocess it, we can recapture that uranium and plutonium.
But there's gonna be some stuff left over that is
not going to be useful for us, and it's really radioactive.
That is high level waste. So we're probably going to

(04:43):
be using high level waste to refer to both that
and the spent nuclear fuel. Just keep in mind that
there are other people and organizations that do differentiate between
the two. There are different things. They're just for the
practical purpose. They're both very radioactive and very dangerous. So alright,
so we talked about our last podcast. We mentioned yucka
mountain in Nevada was going to be a geological repository.

(05:06):
This place where we would be able to put spent
nuclear fuel or high level waste or both uh and
have it safely locked away so that it could not
hurt people for ten thousand years? Was really the idea
or longer? Right? And we mentioned these kind of off
the cuff and mentioned them as well, this is what

(05:26):
is generally agreed upon to be the best idea. So
so why is that? What's going on with these things? Exactly?
So the reason why it's considered to be the best
idea is because it has a whole lot of separation
between us and nuclear waste. But let's talk about what
how many either actually are in existence? Because that's a
real sticking point, right, That's right. There are zero currently
in operation for high level waste or for spent fuel. Yeah,

(05:48):
so why why are these uh, these facilities, these deep
geological repositories ideal for high level waste. Well, I mean again,
it keeps it really far away from people. It's you know,
we're talking about a finding a place on Earth where
we can bury this stuff where you're you're not too
worried about the geological features changing dramatically over the next

(06:12):
hundred thousand years. You want it to remain as stable
as possible because you want it to contain that nuclear waste.
So you don't want to put it in a place
where there's going to be a lot of like earthquakes,
your volcanic activity, and that both of those would be
very bad. Yeah, you don't want to have any any
chance of or you want to minimize the chances of
any sort of breach. You want it to be safe, Like,

(06:34):
you don't want it to be in a really tropical region.
You don't want there to be a lot of water present,
So you want to find an arid or semi arid
kind of area where water is not as big a problem.
You want to be able to isolate the the chamber
wherever you're putting the stuff, the repository itself from any water,
whether it's runoff from from rain or if it's a

(06:55):
water that's underground, you want to make sure it's safe
from all of that so it doesn't contaminate any those
water sources, which could then go go on to enter
into various ecosystems and contaminate them. That would be bad
as well. So you mentioned that there were zero in
operation for high level waste. Are their geological repositories for
something else, maybe intermediate level waste? Yeah, there are three

(07:17):
in operation for low and intermediate level waste. Uh. They
are found in Finland and Sweden. And there's one in
operation for trans uranic waste in the USA at the
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant or WHIP. We will be revisiting
the WHIP facility later on. Yeah. So uh we mentioned
in the last podcast, but just as a reminder, trans

(07:38):
uranic waste is one of those terms that is used
in the United States but not really widely used elsewhere.
It's generally talking about waste elements with atomic numbers that
are higher than uranium. It's a byproduct of nuclear research,
weapons production, and power production. Uh. And it's mostly stuff
like tools, residue gear and usually only contains a small
amount of actually radioactive material. It's still dangerous, but it's

(08:02):
not considered as dangerous as high level waste. It was
used for the waste isolation pilot plant because you didn't
have to go whole hog into high level waste in
your in your pilot program. You know, you want to
test the pilot program, but you don't want to throw
everything at it right at once and then risk having
a catastrophic failure with the worst stuff on the planet. Okay,

(08:25):
so what's the idea behind the pilot plant. Well, it's
a facility outside of Carl's Bad New Mexico, and uh,
it's meant to be a ten thousand years safe facility.
And we talked a little bit in the last episode
about the kinds of things that those facilities include. Um,
what I find really fascinating and kind of charming about
the waist Isolation Pilot Plant is that it furthermore features

(08:47):
a number of magnets, radar reflectors, and forty eight stone
and concrete markers weighing a hundred and five tons each
that are carved with warnings in seven languages and human
faces expressing horror in order to drive people away from
this facility. For years, because the idea being that how
can we protect and we'll talk more about this later,

(09:09):
but how can we protect future generations from something as
dangerous as nuclear waste? Knowing that in ten thousand years time,
think about the last ten thousand years. I mean, we
don't have any languages that date from that far back,
So how would we even know what people how people
are communicating within ten thousand years? Uh? And UH. One

(09:31):
of those languages that was mentioned was Navajo because that
was the native language of the area, UM, which I
thought was very interesting that that was one of the
represented languages on these markers. So yeah, very interesting. And
again we'll revisit that because there's some fascinating things to
talk about in that respect. On top of that, Uh,
this year, two thousand fourteen, there were some incidents early

(09:53):
this year at the waste isolation pilot plant. One of
those was that there was an incident on February fourt fourteen,
so Valentine's Day, there was a radiation leak underground. Uh.
Within a couple of weeks there was detection of airborne
radioactive particles within a half mile from the facility and ultimately,

(10:14):
or at least initially thirteen workers were tested positive as
having radiation exposure. But just I mean, that's serious stuff. Obviously,
you're talking about a facility designed to contain this stuff
and there was a containment failure. Um. One of the
reasons why this is a really serious issue is that
the if you listen to our last episode, you heard
us talk about the yuck A Mountain project and how

(10:36):
political pressures have really set that back to the point
where it may not ever be used for what it
was intended. There are some people who are saying we
should probably look at WHIP as instead the next geological
repository and upgraded so that we could put high level
waste there, because now we've got this pilot program. But
with this radiation leak that really brings that into question too,

(10:58):
Like is it a good idea when we're talking about
a low level or intermediary level type of radiation having
a leakage problem? What happens when we put the high
level stuff there? If there was a leakage problem with that,
it could be even more serious. I mean, any radiation
leakage problem is serious already, but when you're talking about
catastrophic exactly, Yeah, you could have some some truly devastating effects,

(11:21):
especially if that radiation gets leaked into the surrounding ecosystem.
So that's kind of leads into the same discussion we
had last time. The political issues are huge, Like one,
you have to figure out where on Earth are the
prime real estate places for these kind of things. Right, Well,

(11:42):
that's not so much a political issue, that's sort of
a scientific no. But that that's the first problem you have.
It is like, let's just identify where like we obviously
we can't put these anywhere. We have to put them
someplace that is geologically ideal for the for a repository.
That's that's problem one. Yeah, and and even yuck a
moutain some problems with that. I mean, people were arguing
that it was too close to fault lines, and yeah

(12:04):
that there were people who are arguing there was too
much tectonic activity. There were people who are arguing that
there was there were too many cracks in the rock itself,
and of nine potential facilities as the absolute best one.
So nothing is probably going to be absolutely perfect, right,
And so first you have to to pick the places
that you could potentially put this stuff. Then you have

(12:25):
to convince people that that's what needs to go there,
and if you live near those places, like we mentioned
in the last episode, you might have that not in
my backyard reaction where you do not want this dangerous
stuff put near you, and very human and understandable reaction.
It's also one that's problematic because then what do you
do with all the stuff that's accumulating. So um, yeah,

(12:48):
these are really big issues. There's also just the question
of how do you get the nuclear waste from where
it's generated to where it's supposed to go? Right, Yeah,
it opens up the possibility of having a nuclear waste
transportation accident. There's actually debate going on in Scotland right
now about whether local plans should be allowed to consolidate

(13:08):
waste prior to permanent disposal. And you know it's no
one likes car accidents. No one really likes plutonium involved
car accidents, right yeah. Doc Brown told us that that's
a bad idea. Fortunately, as far as I know, I
don't think there's ever been a radioactive waste transportation accident.
So they have them pretty well locked down and it's

(13:28):
an extremely expensive and paperwork filled process. Yeah, it's actually
one of those where you know, obviously if you're going
to be transporting something like that, you have to do
it in a way that is incredibly well coordinated and
extremely secret, because you don't want to publicize when this
dangerous stuff is going to be out in the open,
one site to another dinner bell for potential nuclear weapons makers. Yeah, exactly.

(13:53):
So it's it's certainly one of those things that is
a high, high priority activity whenever it does happen. Uh.
And well we'll talk a little bit more about the
technicalities involved in that later on. Yeah, So let's instead
of looking at this so that the repository was sort
of the the big solution that people settled on a
couple of decades ago. Was saying, all right, this one

(14:14):
sounds like this is the best idea, And as it
turns out, there are a lot of human problems that
make it hard to implement this idea. But what about
other ideas of how to deal with nuclear waste? What
about just crammin it ne garage somewhere. Well, that's what
we're doing right now. Then that, as it turns out,
is not necessarily a long term solution. Uh. And while

(14:37):
I am being facetious by saying that's what we're doing
right now. What we are doing right now is not
that far from cramming it into a garage. I mean,
it's like a really nice garage. It's a garage that
was meant to hold nuclear waste, but not indefinitely. It
was meant to hold it for you know, three decades. Yeah.
So yeah, long term above ground storage that was investigated
by a lot of countries, including the United States, and

(15:00):
and was eventually said, you know, this is not a
good idea. It's just not safe enough. It's not uh,
it's not a permanent solution. It's intermediate at best, so
we need something else. In fact, the United States looked
into it as being a potential long term solution and
then said, yeah, we gotta find a different way. So
that's off the table. Okay, what about this idea of reprocessing.

(15:22):
This has come up before that. Apparently some countries reprocess
spent nuclear fuel to see what they can do with it. Now,
is this something that's going to get rid of the
high level waste problem? Absolutely not. This is what generates
high level waste. Okay, how does it do that? So
you've got the spent nuclear fuel? Uh? And we mentioned
before that when you use nuclear fuel, you only use

(15:44):
up about two percent of it, especially in solid nuclear fuel.
There are different types of reactors, Like if you were
using liquid nuclear fuel, it's a different thing, but your
standards solid nuclear rod, you use up about two percent
of the fuel and the other remains unburned, which means
that you know, if you're just gonna toss that, you're
you're losing. Yeah. Now, the thing is that uranium is

(16:07):
actually not that expensive compared to the process of reprocessing uranium.
So if it's cheaper to buy new uranium than it
is to reprocess the stuff you've already used, guess what
people do. They buy new uranium because there's no incentive
to reprocess the stuff you already have if it's more
expensive than just going out and buying the new stuff. Now,

(16:30):
around the late two thousand's, the price of uranium started
to climb and that caused a lot of countries to
look into this reprocessing uh technique, which means they try
to reclaim as much of the uranium and plutonium that
still exists in that nuclear fuel as possible, And about
of it is uranium and about another percent is plutonium,

(16:51):
and the remaining three is this stuff they can't use.
That's the high level waste that we've been talking about.
That's the stuff that's really dangerous, and it's gonna be
dangerous for a long long time. So we've got to
figure out what to do. So even if you do
reprocess it so that you can use the stuff again
in some other nuclear fuel reaction, whatever that may be,

(17:13):
you still at the end of the day have stuff
left over that you have to figure out what are
you gonna do with it. So it's not it's not
a solution of getting rid of nuclear waste. Um, it's
just how do you keep on using the stuff you've
got for as long as you can, uh, rather than
buying new uranium? So not not a not a long

(17:34):
term solution, and it and it doesn't completely solve the problem,
and not at all. No, you still have the problem
of the high level waste. And eventually, you know, eventually
you're going to get to a point where it will
cost more to reprocess whatever fuel you have than to
just go out and get new stuff, unless you're somehow
re enriching it and recombining it with other reprocessed fuels.

(17:55):
Unless there were regulations that were forcing companies to do this,
it might not be anyone would choose to do right,
and ultimately it's not a big environmental improvement over just
storing spent nuclear fuel in pools, which is what we're
doing right now. We're keeping them in pools for fifty
years before we can do anything else with it. Well,
I have a different solution that involves putting nuclear waste

(18:17):
in waters. What's that, It's called quote disposal. Let's see
a k A. Dumping radioactive waste directly into the ocean. Yeah,
because it's not like there's anything going on, and it's
not like there are complex ecosystems or worldwide movements of
large trade winds, giant currents that could carry nuclear particles

(18:42):
thousands of miles onto the shores of distance. Okay, okay,
let's back off now. Surely nobody would actually do this, right,
It's just one of those. Clearly, this is crazy and
no one would ever do nobody except like a dozen
different countries including the United States, Russia and the former
Soviet Union and the UK, Japan and a bunch of
other European countries. Uh, there are there are dump sites

(19:04):
in the oceans all over the world. Now here's the
here's the big thing to keep in mind, as far
as we know, it's not like people have been dumping
high level waste into the ocean. This is a dump.
They've been dumping intermediate and low level waste into the ocean. Still,
there were decades when this was done, decades if people

(19:24):
began to get increasingly uncomfortable over time. So since the
nineteen nineties, international agreements have banned dumping radioactive waste into
the ocean. But so we we've been doing this since
what like the sixties that I think since the forties maybe,
and then it wasn't until the nineties that we all
got it together to be offended by. We had a
lot going on in the eighties. Um, there was like

(19:46):
a lot going on that you aren't aware of. I mean,
I mean, I was was teaching America how to laugh
on Saturday Night Live, I believe you. And the DVR
didn't even exist yet, so you had to watch that. Yeah,
this is uh so it seems crazy to me even
though this is so. We are talking about lower level wastes,

(20:07):
but it's not that incredibly dangerous high level waste. If
they were doing that, that would be absolutely insane. Yeah,
this lower level waste. Supposedly, from what I've read, most
authorities have said it's probably not really dangerous. It's probably
not significantly harming ecosystems because it's contained and it's the
lower level waste. The water is a very good shield

(20:31):
against radiation. You know, you have to have several You
wouldn't want to get right next to any sort of
radioactive source, even in the water, but ten meters away
it's a you know, if there's ten meters of water
around this radioactive stuff, then it's a very good shielding
unit for it would away in air. Yes, So it's uh,

(20:54):
you know, there's that to consider as well. Depending upon
the dumping site, there could be a minimal impact on
certain ecosystems. But it's still something that I would be
very much not happy with, especially if I were, like,
I don't know someone who actually came across one of
these things, but that's never happened, right, Speaking of that, Yeah,
I read in an article in the Wall Street Journal

(21:14):
this wonderful paragraph quote. Commercial fishermen have at times hauled
up waste containers from various parts of the Massachusetts Bay
home to a dump site. Frank Mirarchi, a seventy year
old retired commercial fisherman said his catches occasionally included nuclear
junk containers. After one such discovery, Mr Mirarchi said government

(21:36):
officials checked him and his crew for radiation but didn't
find problems. Comforting. It's so once again, I do want
to remind you, it's not it's not like that they're
dumping the high level waste. It could be a lot worse.
And they're not not dumping anything now yeah yeah, yeah, right, right,
but just previously dumping the high level waste probably well,

(21:59):
it's far as we know. I'm I mean, honestly, I
don't know what the Soviet Union was doing, but I'm
not sure even the Soviet Union was aware of what
the Soviet Union was doing. That part of the problem.
It's the former Soviet Union. Yeah, But in any case,
so it's not like we've got high level way strolling
around in the ocean as far as we know. But
still bad idea, don't ever do that again, humans, Just

(22:24):
that still please dispose of the stuff properly. And why
that seems to be the wide agreement. You know that
the nations around the world have said, you know what,
you're right, are bad. We won't do that anymore. Yeah,
So let's look at another alternative. How about really really
deep holes in the ground. So when we talk about
stuff like yuck A Mountain, there you're talking about going

(22:45):
down like a thousand feet yeah, three of rock. So
the ideal thing about yucka Mountain is that it was
supposed to be like under three of rock, but also
three above the water table. So it's not going to
be leaking into the groundwater that you're going to pull
up in your well or that's going to get into
the ecosystem, and it's going to be really far separated

(23:08):
from the surface. But you could actually if you weren't
trying to hollow out a full facility with large storage
spaces and stuff like that, you could probably go a
lot deeper. Right sure, I think you're you're dancing around
a bore hole. There. A bore hole indeed where you
you bore a hole into the earth which doesn't involve

(23:31):
speaking like you know, ben Stein at the ground or anything,
and actually involves drilling. Instead of like three d or
a thousand feet, this would be in terms of kilometers deep,
so like maybe two to five kilometers below the surface,
which is not unprecedented we have drilled as far down
as six kilometers for things like oil. So if we

(23:53):
were to identify appropriate areas where the strata UH were
amenable to the kind of things we need to do,
like dump nuclear waste down it, you can totally do that.
You could, at least in theory, bore a hole really
far down, lower the nuclear waste into it, sometimes between
depending upon the type of hole. We've seen estimates between

(24:15):
a hundred and two hundred metric tons could fit in
a single borehole. And you're you're not just gonna just
gonna plunk it in there, like you know, lowering it
would be the best thing. You just drop it. I
don't know. I don't think so. I would consider one
of the one of the big concerns. I'm jumping ahead here,
but one of the big concerns is that what happens
if nuclear waste were to get caught on the way down,

(24:37):
Like you're you're lowering containers and you're not just pouring
out green glowing sludge teenage midget total style into it,
but you're lowering containers down, and if it were to
get stuck on something on the way down, then it
wouldn't be at the appropriate depth the agreed upon death
Like this is all based upon estimations of how long
will this place remain safe because we need a long

(24:57):
term solution. Oh yeah, and also, I mean you're you're
going to be dropping casks, are lowering casks. It's it's
all going to be very well protected. I'm sure before
it even gets to the boreholes. Yeah, so you get
down you lower it down there, about a hundred to
two hundred metric tons of spent nuclear fuel could go
down there. The U S generates at least two thousand

(25:18):
metric tons of this a year. Yeah, there's uh so,
the Nuclear Energy Institute estimates that we produce between about
two thousand and metric tons of spent nuclear fuel per year.
But that is just the spent nuclear fuel, that is
not all of the high level waste, right, and then yeah,
when you're talking about high level waste, you're talking more

(25:38):
like seven thousand metric tons per year. So anyway, for
just the spent nuclear fuel, you would need ten to
twenty bore holes every year to meet that demand. So
you have to you'd have to dig between ten and
twenty every single year to do this kilometers down and
then for the high level waste, you're talking thirty five
to seventy additional ones to handle all that stuff. Um,

(25:59):
And there are some big concerns, Like I said, what
happens if it gets stuck on the way down it's
not the right depth, and that's a problem. How do
you how do you unstick it safely so that you
can lower it all the way to the base. Another
is that you have to develop an appropriate seal for
the top of this borehole so that it is sealed properly.
It's not gonna let any any particulates out, and it's

(26:20):
not gonna easily let anyone else into it, whether on
accident or by design. Um. You know, you have to
make sure that the well casing is really strong so
that it can withstand any kind of shifting. I mean,
obviously you know the ground does tend to shift every
now and again. You don't want to put these anywhere
close to uh an area that has a lot of

(26:40):
earthquake activity, or any earthquake activity. Um. You have to
be really careful about groundwater again, knowing that any sort
of high level waste that's generating heat could cause groundwater
to start to swell. Out of the ground. That's a
big issue because that's gonna alter an ecosystem. Even if
there's no radiation leakage, it changes the eCos tom itself.

(27:01):
So one of the other issues with boreholes is that theoretically,
if you were to use a geological repository, you could
design in such a way that should we come up
with a technology where spent nuclear fuel would be a
great resource to have, you could go and retrieve it.
Not so much with bore holes. Nope. Yeah, so that
would be another potential downside. Now, granted, this is saying

(27:23):
it's a potential downside in the future which may or
may not ever come up with a great way to
use spent nuclear fuel. So you're like, well, okay, but
we that doesn't solve the problem we have right now. Yeah,
we don't as a global population want to be that
that person who just hoards craft materials that they might
never use again, except those craft materials could totally kill you. Yeah, right,

(27:45):
have the world's most dangerous junk drawer. Yeah, I see
where you're going to that. Okay, but surely there are
other wonderful ways we could cram nuclear waste into the
Earth's crust. There are other ways, and don't copy surely,
I'm so sorry. Okay, how about rock melting? Rock melting?
It sounds like a B fift two song, but it

(28:05):
totally isn't. Um rock melting. Yeah, awesome, fantastic. I'm not
participating in this. So the idea is to melt wastes
into adjacent rock to create eventually a solid mass that's
radioactively stable. So think of it this way. You've got
these casks of radioactive material that heat up pretty hot,

(28:29):
you know, especially if you've got a whole bunch of
them together and you put them in an area where
they're surrounded by rocks. They eventually heat the rocks up
to molten status, and the rocks end up kind of
and end up being this gooey thing all around them.
You've got molten radioactive lava essentially, but as it cools,
it solidifies, and that radioactive material would in theory be

(28:53):
fairly uniformly dispersed throughout that solid mass. So instead of
this concentrate did radioactive source, you have a more dispersed
radioactive source that isn't as dangerous over time, and it's
also again deep underground. When you do this, you don't
just pour it out over rocks on the ground. That
also somehow sounds like it would be less likely to

(29:14):
get back out, like if it's incorporated into the rock structure. Yeah,
you wouldn't be able to get back at the stuff
easily in a way that it's again, it's a way
where you're if you were to use this method, you're
not going to be using that for fuel again anytime
in the foreseeable future. Russian scientists even proposed digging a
deep borehole and then putting plutonium in it and then

(29:36):
immobilizing it through the sound use of nuclear explosions. Finally, yeah,
the way to put bomba under the earth. But after
much discussion, it turns out they thought this was a
crazy idea because it who knows what it could do
to the surrounding environment and water table if you were
to detonate a nuclear reaction just to a mobile ice

(30:00):
some nuclear waste underground. So um, it was considered eventually
to be what they call a bad idea and didn't
didn't pursue it. Well, I've got a bad idea that
might be even worse. What if you did pretty much
the same thing but with ice instead. Of rock. So
you put a big, old hot container of radioactive sludge
on top of an ice sheet and just let it

(30:22):
melt straight like ice cube glacier or something like those
things that we're already having a huge problem with melting.
It becomes in sino man and uh to be as
bad to let out of the ice. To be fair,
a lot of these discussions of using ice sheets happened
before we had some major major problems with ice sheets
receding so or at least before they became as noticeable

(30:46):
as they are now. The idea was that you would
put these things on the ice, they would melt a
hole through and just start boring down into the ice sheet,
and then eventually the ice would reform on top of
that hole. So you would have a solid barrier of
ice all around this radioactive material. And as we've discussed,
water is really good at shielding from radiation. Um. But yeah,

(31:10):
international treaties pretty much mean that that is off the table.
For one thing, most countries wouldn't have access to this directly.
They'd have to treaty with some other country that does
have access to it and be able, you know, to
to dump their nuclear waste in another country that's not
likely to happen. Countries don't tend to be too hot

(31:32):
on the idea of yeah, bring us all the stuff
that you're afraid is going to kill you, and will
totally hold on to it for you. And even if
you found a country neutral place, I mean, is an
Antarctica a scientific yeah place? Yeah, we could just scrap
all of the scientific and debtors going on down there. Yea,
there's some treaties that prevent us from doing ok yeah, yeah,

(31:53):
but the same sort of idea, the idea that you know,
we could in theory put it there, except for the
fact that most countries have signed treaties saying we totally
won't do that because we all agree that that's probably
not the best idea, it's not the best use of
the area. No, no, just the fact that it's for
public use. That's kind of like saying, because we can't
dump trash in our front yard, maybe we should just

(32:14):
go dump it in the street. Or really it's in
the yards of those other people over there because they
moved away, and who knows who cares, Let's just put
it all on that vacant lot. Okay, Okay, Well, I
think what about a better idea. Now we have talked before.
We won't really focus on it today because we've done
a whole podcast on it before, but the idea of
like thorium reactors and waste reclaiming nuclear reactors, there are

(32:40):
certain proposals for types of nuclear energy that could use
up some of this stuff that currently becomes waste, which
I think is a brilliant idea if if we can
make it practical. Yeah, and as long as you can
make it where again you're getting more energy out of
the deal than it took to make the deal possible.
Even if that's a long term prospect, then that's that's

(33:02):
something we should look into. What about this idea of remediation, Well,
remediation is one of those fields that scientists researchers are
looking into as a possible way of dealing with nuclear waste,
including using stuff like microbes or metal sulfides, transmutation methods,
bringing old alchemy into the nuclear age. But the whole

(33:25):
idea is just to decrease the radioactivity of nuclear waste.
But the thing is, we don't know if any of
those methods are ever going to be scalable, if we'll
ever be able to deal with more than just minute traces.
It may be that in the lab, sure this method
works great for this tiny amount of radioactive material, but
if you're talking about the material produced by an entire

(33:46):
nuclear plant over the course of a year, there may
not be any practical way of using these methods to
deal with that amount of waste. And even if it's practical,
it may not in the sense of it works. It
may not be practical from an energy or monetary source
if it costs more energy for you to do than
some other method. Yeah, yeah, okay, So I think what

(34:08):
all of this is leading up to is the basic
fact that we don't even want this on our planet.
This is not There is no good place that is
entirely safe for us to put nuclear waste, not that
we can access anyway, right right, Well, I guess we
could put it into the core, but you can't really
get there. If there was only like a little hatch
straight to the core, we had some kind of Jewels

(34:29):
Burne style machine for that, then that would be terrific.
But why don't we just shoot it into space? Y'all?
This is the internet comment or solution. Shot Yeah, blasted it,
blow it out the airlock. Same thing for trash, right,
that was the same thing. I was like, why don't
we just like get rid of the landfills by attaching
it to like a giant net to a rocket just

(34:49):
aimed that sucker at the Sun and say, Sionara, Man, yeah,
it doesn't make sense to shoot it into space. The
answer is no, it does no, no, no, no, no no.
Joe pray tell why does it not make sense? Well?
I just decided to gather a few basic facts and
then do some depressing math, and now we bring you
the popular forward thinking segment depressing math. Okay, so, first

(35:18):
of all, space launches are very very expensive, so cost
per pound is going to vary with every launch, and
so different rockets will have have different expenses. But the
older commonly cited figure is that on average, it costs
NASA about ten thousand bucks per pound to take cargo
from the surface of the Earth to low Earth orbit. Okay,

(35:41):
so in the near future that average might change. It's
probably going to be different. We don't know exactly what
the number is going to be, so maybe we imagine
with the advent of private space launches, it'll get a
lot lower. Suffice to say that it's still gonna be
really high cost. So take whatever low ball option you want,
and let's say, for to have some contrast, maybe they'll

(36:01):
cut it in half to five thousand dollars a pound.
I think that might be very optimistic, but we don't know.
So the nuclear industry produces about two thousand metric tons
of spent nuclear fuel per year, according to the Nuclear
Energy Institute, and they are a nuclear industry lobbying groups.
So I think it's a good idea to suspect that

(36:22):
these figures might be conservative. And this is just for
the United States, right, Yes, So metric tons is about
five million, seventy thousand pounds. Multiply that by ten thousand
dollars per pound, and it's fifty point seven billion dollars
a year in launch costs. And that's just launching. That's

(36:43):
not counting the transportation of getting the waste to the
launch site, or what we do with it once it's
in space, or even developing the right kind of capsule
to carry the stuff in the first place. Right, right, Right,
So if you want to be much more optimistic and
assume the launch costs of five thousand dollars per pound,
that's still twenty five point or billion dollars. And that's

(37:03):
just the spent nuclear fuel. Okay, well, what about high
level waste? And so if you assume there you're talking
about a number something like seven thousand metric tons a year,
that's about fifteen point four million pounds. So to ship
that into space at ten thousand per pound to be
a hundred and fifty four billion dollars a year at
five thousand and be seventy seven billion dollars every year.

(37:25):
And keep in mind also this is just the new
spent nuclear fuel and high level waste that we're producing
every year, not counting all the stuff we've already got
sitting there. Can we afford not to shoot it into space?
I want to say one more thing, hold on, that's
also just talking about low Earth orbit. To send something

(37:46):
farther away than low Earth orbit, like to say, shoot
it into the Sun as some people have imagined, which actually,
if you're going to shoot it into space, that's probably
one of the best places to send it. You don't
really want to keep it in low Earth orbit with
the potential for it to have orbit decay and fall
right back to Earth, right, so you want to take
it to the Sun, like like Superman did with nuclear

(38:08):
weapons in Superman for the Quest for Peace, one of
our favorite shows to reference on Fantastic documentary, one of
our favorite movies here. Uh, it would cost even more,
I mean a lot more. Typically fuel costs to get
it out there. It'll take something to like to geosynchronous orbit,
costs a lot more than he wants. You get out
of the travitational pull of Earth. You really just need

(38:30):
a little thrust and then it'll just it'll just go.
You know. Well that way, the costs of rocket launches
aren't just in the fuel. I mean, that's a lot
of it, but a lot of it's got to be
in in designing this capsule and stuff like that. So
the even more important issue is that even if we
were to have unlimited money to blast this stuff into space,

(38:51):
the bigger concern is what happens if there's a critical
launch failure on a vehicle that is carrying high level
nuclear waste. Yeah. We The sad fact about the space
industry is that it hasn't gone off without a hitch.
There is a long history of failures. Some catastrophe in
nature somewhere tragically people lost their lives as a result,

(39:13):
and you know, it's it's just a it's a fact
that things that we build will not always work exactly
as we had intended all the time, right, So it
is a very horrible tragedy when there's a launch failure
and astronauts lose their lives. It would be so much
worse even to not only have astronauts lose their lives,
but to have high level nuclear waste raining down over

(39:37):
the surface of the Earth from the atmosphere. I mean,
that's that that's just horrible scenario. Well, I mean, we
talked about the not in my backyard problem with the
the geological repositories. Can you imagine the reaction of people
who live near launch sites if it were made public

(39:57):
that we are going to attempt to launch nuclear waste
into space. This place where tragedy has struck before, could
potentially become ground zero for high level waste raining down here.
And even if you could, you know, material science your
way into a container that would absolutely be full proof
against that kind of thing. That's a container that you're

(40:18):
talking about shooting into the sun. And I'm sure it's
not inexpensive to crank out. Yeah, it's not feasible for
multiple reasons. It's it would be incredibly expensive, The risk
would be astronomical, not to make too big of a
space pun on it. Uh, and so it just it
does not make sense if we had a magical teleport device, sure,

(40:39):
but we don't have one of those. So we have
to we have to deal with the problem here on Earth.
So I guess that's not to say that at no
point in the future of humanity will it ever be feasible,
but you just have to. It would take a lot
to get there. It have to be much more economically
feasible to take stuff to orbit. You'd have to have
a very very safe way of transporting cargo from the

(41:02):
surface to orbit, and right now we have nothing like that.
All that being said, the United States did actually look
into this as a potential way, not necessarily, you know,
throwing all their chips into it. They're just like, well,
does this make sense? Had somebody write up a report?
I guess yeah. There probably was just a big response
to just said nope. So they didn't go with the idea. No,

(41:24):
they did not. As a quick fix, something a little
bit more down to earth has been proposed, And sorry,
I'm sorry I couldn't be great ahead. Some people are
proposing two and fifty years sites for storing this kind
of waste. Yeah, I think that's a much better idea. Yeah. Well,
and you know, and in response, some people have said, well,

(41:47):
what about the real sites like yuck A Mountain And
I mean, okay, look, you guys, currently the uck A
Mountain project dot gov website is a time stamp. Yeah,
it literally just gives you the time stamps. Nothing. They're
not even a few under construction gifts, right, don't even
have a looping midi of something playing in the background.

(42:11):
I think we should write them and to their non
existing email address and let them know about this. But
the problems with these two hundred and fifty year sites
are that, I mean, basically, they're only good for two
fifty years. That's not actually that's really only delaying the
problem for a very short period of time globally speaking.

(42:31):
And you're still incurring the expense of building these sites
and transporting all of this waste over to them, which,
as we mentioned before, is not really easy or simple. Um.
I mean, we do already do quite a bit of it.
According to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we already have
some three million packages of radioactive materials being shipped by highway, rail, air,

(42:54):
and water around the United States every year, which is
a lot. It seems like a whole bunch to me,
especially considering that it's such an expensive sounding process that
involves all of this shipping materials, testing, like every single
container that is used has to be exposed to really
stringent testing, and um furthermore, a lot of interdepartmental handshakes

(43:15):
and paperwork, and furthermore, like armed escorts in the case
have spent fuel going through populated areas. All all kinds
of considerations are taken. Now, I will say that I've
seen some people propose that we go with the two
fifty year route, working toward making facilities that would be
strong enough to go much longer than that, Like I
like a rent to own option. Yeah, The idea being

(43:36):
that it's a lot easier to sell the idea of
two d fifty years because you actually have to build
in stuff like budget, right, you have to budget for
a facility that can be with can withstand this for
two hud fifty years. If you design something that can
actually last ten thousand years, but you sell it as
two d fifty years, then suddenly you have something that's
easier to work around when you're talking about numbers and

(43:58):
spreadsheets and budgets. I know that sounds crazy, It sounds
insane that it all comes down to moving some figures
around on a spreadsheet to make sure that you can
pay for the thing that you need. But ultimately, that's
the reality we live in. So it is possible that
just by reframing a repository as saying this is a
two and fifty year solution rather than a ten thousand

(44:20):
year solution, you make get a more likely reality. That's
something someone will be all right, well, I can I
can wrap my head around that. When you give me
a number like ten thousand years, it's so long that
I just my reaction is just immediately to go on
the defensive two or fifty years. Although it's well beyond
the expected lifespan of anyone living today, barring any miraculous

(44:44):
discoveries in one form or another, I mean, singularity all aside,
then it's something that's a little bit easier for us
to comprehend. It's well, yeah, ten thousand years, you're talking about,
that's that's going into prehistoric time. If we ten thousand
years back. That's like the beginning of agriculture, basically the

(45:05):
two d fifty years. Then you're like, oh, okay, I
know in general what people were like two fifty years ago.
Years in the future, is it's going to be like
floating skateboards. Yeah, yeah, actually that's next year. They won't
technically be skate boards, will they know? They'll be hoverboards?
Right yeah, coming to your fact straight, Lauren, I mean

(45:27):
the next year. I think October next year actually, according
to Back to the Future too. Oh nice, we'll have
to look out for those, okay, okay. So I want
to move the discussion onto one last consideration, which which
I think is actually one of the most interesting questions. Um,
let's say that we don't have a solution that's one
of these sort of reprocessing or remediation solutions. One of

(45:49):
the things that that takes the waste out of the picture.
Assuming we have waste that's gonna be here to stay,
how do we talk to the future to keep it safe? Right,
So we'll say that, Um, I think would y'all agree
that for now it seems like the standard answer. The
deep geological repositories probably are the best solution currently more

(46:12):
than all these alternatives, I think, out of all the
ones that have been proposed, they are they make the
most sense. Okay, yeah, I would probably agree. So imagine
you've got a facility that's a deep geological repository. It's
a place where deep under the ground there is a
bunch of buried, very dangerous waste, and it's going to
be dangerous, long long, long after year gone ten thousand

(46:36):
years in the future, maybe even a hundred thousand years
in the future. How do you communicate that fact to
the future. Actually, uh so, one of my favorite other
podcasts did a great episode about this. It's a podcast
called Invisible and so if you're a fan of our show,
you should also check them out. Um they did in

(46:57):
an episode I think it was called ten thousand Years,
and they look into exactly this problem in the episode,
and I just really liked it a lot. I like
them so much. I really think, all you should go
check it out. So I wanted to give them a
shout out. And they focused on the idea that at
the place we talked about earlier, the waste isolation pilot plant,
the whip facility, there was a project to study exactly

(47:20):
this problem of how to communicate the danger of a
nuclear waste storage facility two people far far in the future,
when you can't anticipate what sort of language they will
be using, how they'll be communicating. How do how do
you communicate something when you have no clue what the
those people are going to use as a basis for communication.

(47:41):
I mean, if you're talking to people ten thousand years
in the future, you're basically talking to aliens. I mean
they there is no guarantee they'll speak any language that's
on Earth today. There's no guarantee that they will share
our cultural knowledge, so they might not even understand the
same symbols we have to. I like the part, and

(48:01):
this was in the podcast. You definitely should listen to
that that episode because it was very informative and entertaining.
I like the part where they talked about how people
gravitate towards the skull and crossbones as a warning, saying,
you know, that's like poison, danger, pirates, etcetera, things that
you don't necessarily want to encounter. Keep in mind, folks,
not all pirates, like Johnny Depp. In fact, I think

(48:23):
none of them did um So you know, It's one
of those one of those things where said, well this
is this is clearly going to be that kind of warning,
except that if you look around today, you see lots
of skull and crossbones on stuff like kissing boards. Yeah,
my wife has a sweater with one that has a
little pink bow on it. Um. You know. It's these

(48:45):
are things that we have perhaps diluted its meaning. So
in other words, we cannot count on a culture thinking
of skull and crossbones is any kind of warning they
might think, Oh wow, this is where the hot topics started.
One thing I thought about is that the nuclear symbol,
we expect that should continue to have meaning for all ages. Now,
how many novelty items have you seen with the nuclear

(49:08):
symbol on them? Again? Yeah, we have perhaps diluted that
that so yeah, so uh. In this other podcast they
talk a lot about the the signs and the symbols
and how to communicate that in sort of these visual warnings.
But I wanted to focus on something else, something else
the Whip Project studied, which was trying to create landscapes

(49:32):
that would themselves discourage people from coming near them. So
sort of this landscape engineering what I would call stay
away scapes. Right. Um, that seemed like a really interesting
idea to me because that might rely less on people
being able to understand the messages you're sending through text
or through pictures. So you're purposefully making the landscape foreboding

(49:55):
and and uh, trying to communicate the idea of this
a bad place without knowing what the cultural ideas of
good and bad are going to be in ten thousand years.
Just try and make it so that any reasonable person
would look at that and say, yeah, not going there. Yeah,
so let's let's just put ourselves in the space and
try to imagine what you would have to do. So

(50:18):
you've got an area of land, and you need to
put things there, and and they're gonna have to have
a lot of qualities. Like one of the qualities those
items you put in the place need to have is
that they make the message clear, like they say stay
away very clearly. They have to be able to last
as long as the facility is gonna lie exactly, and

(50:38):
if that's going to be ten thousand years or even
a hundred thousand years, I mean, what on earth? It's
like impossibly sturdy material, right, they have to be something
that's not going to be blown away by the wind.
Or so let's just look around and all the stuff
humans have built that have lasted for ten thousand, you know,
I mean not much. Maybe some ancient megalithic st uture

(51:00):
is at Malta, I guess, I mean not ten thousand.
But now when you're going ten thousand, you're kind of
looking at caves. It has to be able to, uh,
to withstand the natural kind of removal and recycling process
of the earth erosion and stuff. So a lot of
the ideas that have been floated you might understand why

(51:20):
their ideas for like gigantic stone monuments and stuff like that. Yeah,
I can't think of ever a time in my life
where I saw some sort of gigantic structure and thought,
oh gosh, I totally don't want to get closer and
see what the heck that thing is. That's exactly the
next problem. You have to actually make sure that this
thing is not attractive. So, like one of the ideas

(51:43):
they mentioned is this landscape of thorns. Did y'all see
the pictures on the whip site. Yeah, the pictures just
made me think there's no way I would not want
to go there. The idea behind it. So it was
designed by one of the people this project contacted. They
had this idea that you should have these scary looking
spikes jutting up out of the earth to to communicate

(52:03):
a sense of danger and foreboding, to make it look
like a really scary place, you know, the the Valley
of Thorns in a Disney movie. It looked to me
like the landscape you would see in a Tim Burton
film before he took a heat lamp to it and
it formed all the little curly cueues. Yea, so pretty much. Well, anyway,
what it looked to me was like something that would
make me think, Man, I gotta go check that out.

(52:26):
It's like a playground. I want to go to there. Exactly.
It's when you make things that are intentionally designed to
look scary, they actually end up looking too interesting. Quality
to that, Yeah, you'd have to figure out some way
of making it less interesting. So maybe you make the
most boring place, right, No one would want to go
there as Also, what are these design elements created from,

(52:48):
because there's the potential of people going like, this looks
like a terrific recycling field exactly. That's exactly right. So
you want to you don't want to make them out
of anything that can be repurpose because people might show
up in ten thousand years whatever and say, hey, you
know that's a bunch of steel. I can make buildings
out of steel. Let me get some of this and

(53:10):
might as well build a building next to this place.
So this creates a really difficult problem. How how do
you achieve all of these different ideas? I mean, one
idea I thought about was instead of having any kind
of like spikes or interesting jutting features, would be to
kind of try to create the most unfriendly but uninteresting

(53:32):
landscape possible. So maybe just this landscape of really unclimbable
rock rubble. Does that make any sense? Sure? I suppose
so I was, I mean, with it with a barrier
around it. I think it's really the barrier around it.
If you have a whole lot of I mean at
a safe distance, a whole lot of big blocks that

(53:53):
have you know, human faces contorted in horror. But yet again,
I would think that was interesting. And one thing you
might notice is, uh so lots of ancient tombs and
stuff like that are covered in warnings. You know, they
have things on them that look like don't come in
here because you will be tortured by evil spirits if

(54:15):
you do. And what do people do? They go right
on it, and that looks so cool. There's response to
that is law's ancient Egypt. After after a few people
go in to your nuclear waste site that has been
warning that there are evil spirits here, they get sick
and die, and then you get the growing folklore that indeed,
evil spirits live there and we need to stay away.

(54:37):
Well not, I mean, again, using ancient Egypt as a
as an example, there are still to this day rumors
that going into these ancient tombs of great warning, you know,
there are still rumors that that will let evil spirits
upon you. And then people have died. In my case,
there'll there'll be a pile bodies. So but no, but

(55:01):
you forget several things. I mean, number one, yeah, don't
people still think Howard Carter was killed by the Mummy's curse? Uh?
And then number two, the effects of radiation might be
very slow acting. You might have people establish a community
before they start getting all these problems, but the community
dies out, and again you're just trying to emphasize your cruelty.

(55:22):
I'm just saying, I'm just saying that if if one
small portion of humanity in ten thousand years has to die,
so that the rest of humanity is aware that there,
in fact is a terrible, terrible thing here that will
cause harm due to the stupid decisions of of their ancestors. Okay,

(55:42):
rather than how do we figure out a warning that
will actually apply to them? I mean, ultimately it's going
to be we don't have any way of knowing, right,
there's no way for us to know buying buying the
invention of a time machine. We cannot tell so ultimately,
and also it's not really going to matter to any
of us eventually, I mean not directly, it really isn't

(56:03):
we have I think you're a terrible person, John, I'm
not saying. I'm not saying we don't have a responsibility
for future generations. We certainly do. I believe. However, not
only are we not going to know about it, it's
not going to matter to us by the time it
actually ends up being a problem for them. But perhaps
we should. We should task um, some someone I don't know,

(56:26):
family or organization or whatever it is, to every year
ago and an update in whatever the language is, or
every decade or something like that, go up and update
the stones and and be like inherited position to be
the keeper of the stones and be like no for serious,
We're like like, we'll kill you. Yeah, that's actually something
like that is sort of part of the proposal they

(56:46):
ended up with is the signs include requests for people
in the future who come across the signs to make
new copies of the signs that will withstand the elements.
I think what they're saying like, if this is hard
to read, please make a new copy. They just need
to set up a speaker and a looping MP three

(57:06):
of Slim Whitman's singing and that'll be enough. People just
like I do not want to be here. And then
they they yet another. So here's another idea I thought of.
It's that better than my idea. It might be a
little bit better than your ideas. I wondered if you
could take advantage of natural landscapes on the Earth. For example,

(57:30):
there are places on the planet Earth that you absolutely
do not want to go, and they're bad in really
uninteresting ways, like just the center of a desert where
there's nothing there and nothing grows and no one settles,
and it's just an utter waste land. I wonder if
the best solution would be to do that now the

(57:53):
I thought that for a moment, and then I thought
to myself, We'll wait a minute, though. How long does
it take a climb it to change? How can you
predict what that landscape is going to look like in
ten What if it's fertile land in a few thousand years?
You know, I mean that's a long time. It's it's
a long enough time for things to especially considering the
rate of change right that it's hard to predict what

(58:17):
is going to be an arid landscape, uh, ten thous
years from now. I mean, it's tricky. So, as it
turns out, this is a hard problem, and it's it's
this is one of the reasons why it's taken us
so long. Why why we've been running out the clock
on the length of time the above ground facilities have

(58:37):
been holding on to high level waste while we try
to come up with a working, working solution for the
permanent place of that stuff. Yeah, maybe what we really
do need to do is start up it, start out
some of these like two fifty year kind of facilities
and sort of leave a memo to the future and
be like, hey, we tried, yeah, and meanwhile we're still

(59:01):
making this stuff. Sorry. This also is one of the
reasons why I really hope that fusion ends up working
out somewhere down the line, because it would produce far
fewer dangerous byproducts than the fiscile version of nuclear power,
or that any of the technologies to reclaim and repurpose

(59:22):
some of the spent nuclear fuel. Yeah. Yeah, if it
becomes a scalable, financially feasible method, than yes, that would
also be a great benefit to humanity. Again, I think
nuclear power the principles are are sound. It's just that
the reality of what do you do with this nuclear

(59:43):
waste is a real problem that we have to figure
out how to solve. Um. Barring anyone finding that magic
hatch to the core of the Earth, it's going to
be one that's going to require some pretty difficult decisions.
So it'll be something that I expect we'll see more
about the within our lifetimes. Yeah. Well, I mean, in
the meantime, get those geological facilities going. Yeah, if you can.

(01:00:08):
I mean, there's a lot of political pressure to not
do that thing in any given place, but if it's
at all. You know, if it's one of those things
that can be done, it should be done because it
does look like it's the best option out of all
the ones that have been explored so far. So unless
someone's come up with something brand new tomorrow, which would
be wonderful. Um, I totally agree. If we can get

(01:00:31):
some movement on the geological repository front, that would be awesome.
All right, Well, that wraps up this discussion about you know,
what do we do about this problem with nuclear waste?
And obviously you know the the answers are tough, but
they are ones that we need to tackle. So again,
we need to concentrate on these problems. Otherwise there there's
not a solution that's going to come up magically. We've
got to act on this sort of thing. Uh. Anyway,

(01:00:54):
if you guys have suggestions for future episodes of forward Thinking,
you've got any ideas for something you definitely want to
year in the future, let us know on Twitter, on Facebook,
or on Google Plus. Our handle at all three is
f w Thinking and we will talk to you again
really soon. For more on this topic and the future

(01:01:16):
of technology, visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you
by Toyota. Let's go places