The Problem With Nuclear Waste

Nuclear power has a lot of advantages but one big disadvantage is the nuclear waste. Why is it such a problem?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Stay there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, I'm fixing
a hole where the rain gets in. I'm Jonathan Strickland

(00:21):
and I'm Joe McCormick. So you know, we talked a
lot on this show about meeting our energy needs in
various ways. We've talked about renewable energy. We've talked about
alternatives to using petroleum based energy. We've talked about our
old friend Cole, Yeah, we have. We've talked about fusion

(00:41):
as a potential future energy source, should we ever really
solve that problem there there are some promising scientific experiments
that could lead to fusion one day being a real contender,
but for now it's still very much in that sort
of theoretical and and and experimental stage. But Jonathan, what's
the opposite of fusion? Well, let's see, there's you mean,

(01:04):
like jazz fusion. I'd say punk really is kind of
the opposite of fusion. I don't know about that. The
opposite of fusion is probably like country western music. That's
that's a fusion of country and western Okay, guys, I
think we're getting off topic. I think I think, well,
I think what you what you meant was vision, right, vision,

(01:28):
So it's a fusing, fusing two things to become a
new one thing. You're taking one thing and splitting it
up into two things. Although I think that that another
episode in the future about the future of musical fusion. Yeah,
then have our discussion about jazz fusion and country Western music. No, today,
we're going to talk about vision. Nuclear fission, the standard,

(01:48):
regular old vision, which is great because we already know
how to do it. It works today. Yeah, in fact,
we don't even have to be around for it to happen.
But all so, why are we talking about it if
it already works today? Specifically, because while nuclear power is
certainly something we can tap into, it comes with a
pretty big drawback. Yeah. So nuclear power has no direct

(02:13):
carbon emissions, it's very productive, it's very powerful, and it's
ready to go today. These are all really really great
things about nuclear power. So really, why would anybody be
opposed to nuclear power? There's essentially one main reason. Yeah,
the stuff that's left over after you have created your
nuclear reactions to heat up water to turn turbines. Because Remember, ultimately,

(02:37):
that's what we're talking about, is that the nuclear power
is just used to generate it of generating heat, generate
turbine spinning. Yeah, you're just making steam, is all you're
really doing the same sort of thing is with steam engines.
Is just now you're you've souped it up. Well. Yeah,
And the problem here actually isn't always just what's left behind,
but the fuel in general. It's people tend to have

(02:58):
a problem with because, as it turns out, radioactive stuff,
in addition to creating a lot of steam very efficiently,
is not safe. Yeah, it's not good, not good for things?
What are living? Juggle it? No, do not play with
a super happy fun ball. No, do not do not
look No. So this is the problem we're going to
talk about today. Actually over the next two podcasts. This

(03:19):
is going to be a two parter. Today is part
one where we're going to talk about what's the problem
with nuclear waste because it is very much a future problem,
and then on the next podcast we're going to talk
about proposed solutions what what are you going to do
about it? Today, we decided to just devote this to
talking about what the problem is and sort of looking

(03:40):
at what it means for us. So what is radioactive
waste and how is it produced? And are are there
different kinds of radioactive waste? They are absolutely different kinds
of radioactive waste. So now we're talking about radioactive stuff.
This is stuff that specifically ionizing creation, stuff that is uh,

(04:02):
potentially harmful because it can cause electrons to fly off
of ados and eventually cause things like mutations and other issues.
Will go into more about that in a little bit,
but specifically, the type that most people are absolutely terrified
of is called high level waste, which can sometimes also

(04:25):
include spent nuclear fuel, although generally speaking they people tend
to separate the two as two separate things. But they
both are extremely dangerous, all right. The spent fuel is
possibly even more dangerous, but yeah, it's it's but neither
of them, again are things you want to juggle, right, So,
spent nuclear fuel is exactly what it sounds like. It's

(04:47):
it's when you have used these nuclear rods or you know,
whatever format the nuclear fuel has come into, Uh, it
has lost enough of its reactive nature, so there's no
longer as efficiently heating up water to super high temperatures.
So you need to replace it with new fuel. Uh,
that's spent nuclear fuel is pretty dangerous. Now, some countries

(05:08):
will end up trying to reprocess that spent nuclear fuel
to recapture some of the uranium and plutonium that's in it, because,
as it turns out, there's quite a bit of unused
or unburnt fuel in those fuel rods. Uh. We're talking
around of the fuel being unused. So the processing, the

(05:30):
reprocessing of this ends up creating a mixture of uranium
and plutonium. And then you have this leftover stuff. About
three percent of it is completely left over that you
can't do anything with. It's called high level waste. Uh.
And while it only makes up three percent of of
the actual volume of stuff, it makes up of the

(05:51):
radioactivity of the nuclear waste that we generally talk about,
like what are we going to do with this stuff?
So this is the really super dangerous stuff. So what
are the attributes of this this high level ways store
spent nuclear fuel? If you're going to group them together,
or we'll just today group them together because they're both
there's the same sort of problem. Uh. They're both very

(06:14):
radioactive and very hot, and we produce a kind of
significant amount of it when you combine all of our
nuclear facilities together, right especially we're mainly going to be
talking about the United States in these podcasts, but keep
in mind that, of course, the United States is not
the only country using nuclear power. There are a lot
of countries that do. And all of the countries have

(06:35):
to consider what are they going to do with this
nuclear waste once once it starts to accumulate, what do
you do with it? Now? For the most part, the
first thing we do is we end up using water
to help shield, well, one to cool it and two
to shield us from the radioactivity water. As it turns out,
it's a really good shield if you have a lot

(06:56):
of it. So it turns out that removing high level
waste from uh spent nuclear fuel usually you have to
do it underwater, and then you store it in a
pool of water. And you're talking about for spent nuclear fuel,
you would want to store it in water for about
fifty years before you do anything else with it. Yeah.
The high level waste can be stored for as little

(07:18):
as only five yeah, and then put into dry cask containers.
Usually the pools of water also contain some kind of
shielding material like boron that will help help absorb any
free right, any any free particles that are emitted through this,
because keep in mind the nuclear reactions we're talking about
the reason why this is a good fuel source is

(07:40):
the fact that once you start a reaction, it helps
sustain itself, right. It gives off the particles that continue
to allow the unspent fuel to then react. It becomes
a chain reaction. And in fact, if you do not
control this chain reaction, that's when you go into something
like a nuclear meltdown, which we have all pretty much

(08:01):
agreed is what we would call a bad thing. Yes,
so I'm good, um, but yeah, So after five years,
you can take the high level wastes and store them
in these dry ventilated steel containers that are filled with
inert gases something like helium um and then you can
place those in concrete containers. That's called your your dry containment.

(08:21):
And uh, Ultimately, the idea that that most people came
into agreement on several decades ago was that you would
move the stuff to a geological repository, which essentially means
a really deep hole in the ground where it would
be safe from everything else. But we'll have more to
say about that a little bit later, and just for

(08:43):
the record, as of two thousand nine, each one of
these dry casks cost about a million bucks to create. Yeah,
so that's that's your high level waste. That's that's just
one of several types of waste that we haven't even
covered the other types yet we're about too. So keep
in mind that that high level waste, that's the main
thing people are worried about it. It is very radioactive,

(09:03):
very dangerous. You don't want to get near it. But
it's only about three percent of the volume of the
total waste we create. So there's a there's a much
larger group of things we create that are somewhat radioactive,
the lower level waste. You've got intermediate level waste and
low level waste. And this comes from the fact that radioactivity,

(09:25):
uh you might say is sort of like cooties on
the playground Dead. You certainly have said that, because it
says it in the notes. So you take a very
radioactive object like some plutonium core, okay, and then you
expose that to a second object to just imagine it is,

(09:45):
I don't know, a T shirt, okay. So that second
object can then actually become dangerous in itself, even after
you've removed it from the plutonium core. Why is that, Well,
there are a couple of reasons. I think the main
one is that tiny radioactive particles or radioactive dust can

(10:05):
attach itself to this second object. So then, yeah, you
might have particles that are so small you can't see them,
but these particles are radioactive and they're still capable of
shooting out these uh, these tiny you know, ionizing radiations
that can do major damage to you. The other thing

(10:26):
is that some types of objects, when they're bombarded with radioactivity,
can become radioactive themselves, Like so some of the atoms
within them will change to radioactive isotopes that can then
turn around and start giving off their own radiation, and
that's bad news. Also, though I think that's less often
a concern than the previous The main one you're talking

(10:47):
about is these radioactive particles that dust. So these secondary
objects like this make up these lower level waste, this
intermediate waste, low level wasts that represent the majority of
what's produced by nuclear power generation. And these waste products
can include all kinds of stuff, from like old parts
of the reactor or of the cooling assembly, to tools

(11:07):
or protective clothes and shieldings, masks, gloves, all kinds of
stuff that's been around other things that are radioactive. Yeah,
general rule of thumb is the longer it's been in
contact with the radioactive source, the more likely it's going
to be an intermediary level waste rather than a low
level waist. Whereas things that have had limited contact tend

(11:28):
to fall into the low level waist. That's just a
general rule of thumb. It doesn't necessarily apply in every case,
but something like say a filter would be intermediary because
it had more consistent contact with the source of radiation,
whereas a suit that was worn by someone who had
to do some maintenance within an area that had some

(11:49):
radioactivity might be considered low level because while it had exposure,
it was it was only on one occasion and it
was limited. But you still have to classify its waste.
That needs to be dealt with in a particular way,
right because at a certain point, if you expose that
T shirt to another T shirt, you've got another radioactive
T shirt and then and eventually that's going to get

(12:10):
exposed to somebody. Radioactive T shirts all the way down,
probably through a T shirt cannon of some sort. Yeah,
it's it's oh no, yeah, bring bring some pre show
discussion into the show. That's what I'm doing right now, folks. Um.
But that's actually not all, folks. There are other kinds
of radioactive byproducts of this entire nuclear energy equation. You've

(12:32):
also got basic stuff that was created when the raw
nuclear materials were taken out of the ground. For example,
uranium mill tailings, which is a sand like byproduct of
mining uranium. It can contain flex of radium, uranium, thorium,
and lots of other hazardous stuff and UH and and
like all of this other waste, it can contaminate the

(12:54):
local air, water, or nearby objects. It produces gamma radiation,
and you know, generally it really does take some care
and concern to be disposed of properly. But we'll talk
more about that disposal process a little bit later, right.
And one other type I want to mention, which is
really only recognized by the United States is transuranic or

(13:15):
transuranic waste, which is essentially waste that involves UH elements
with atomic numbers higher than uranium. It's usually produced as
a byproduct of UH nuclear weapons research or laboratory research.
It can also come from nuclear power. We're talking mostly
about man made elements at this point, but that's another

(13:36):
type of nuclear waste that doesn't easily fall into these
other categories. Seems like the right. Certainly, if there's some
plutonium in it, isn't it technically transuranic? Uh? It's. It
certainly can overlap it's And again it's one of those
designations that we find in the United States but not
in other countries. It's going to come into play when

(13:57):
we talk about geologic reposite tories and whether or not
we have any working ones currently. Yeah. Okay, so we've
separated the nuclear waste down into these categories, but we
should probably talk about how dangerous is it. Should we
be worried? Well, all right, should we be worried in general?

(14:19):
I mean, you don't need to lose sleep tonight day
to day, You're all right, But let me try to
approach that again. Um, let's say you walk into a
room with some high level waste in it and you
just stand there for ten minutes. Should you be worried? Yes?
You should. You should. First of all, you should be
worried about anyone who told you that was a good
idea because that person does not like you. Um. The

(14:41):
in fact, the the whole concept of the danger of
radiation uh involves the level of radioactive material, the amount
of time that you have spent an exposed to said material,
and the distance between you and said material. Before we
get into that, let's just let's just talk about plutonium,

(15:02):
all right, Just using plutonium as an example, now, uh,
there is uh, there are a lot of people who
say that plutonium is the most toxic substance on Earth.
I kind of maybe take issue with that because there
are a lot of different ways you can measure toxicity
and plutonium. I mean, there are different isotopes of plutonium.
Someone much more dangerous. If someone were to give you

(15:24):
a big old bowl of plutonium dust and say and
a spoon, and say, do you want to ingust this
or do you want to say that it's the most
toxic stuff in the universe? I think you go with
the second one. Well, what if somebody gave you a
big bowl of plutonium dust and also gave you a
big bowl of bochi linum toxin and and said what
that you have to eat? Yeah, whichever is the least toxic.
I mean, I guess it depends on whether or not

(15:46):
there any marshmallows in either of them. At that point,
that's usually how I make my decision on all serial
based products. Okay, no, I'm sorry, my I should take
my piddling objection aside. In any case, whatever it is,
you don't want to mess around with plutonium. Breathe in
plutonium dust significantly increases your chances of developing lung cancer later. Now,
when I say significantly increases your chances, keep in mind

(16:09):
that does not mean you will definitely develop lung cancer.
It also doesn't mean that if you do develop lung
cancer that was specifically because you breathed in plutonium particles.
There may be other contributing factors that lead to that,
including inherited ones, whether or not you're a smoker, other
issues like that. So the point being, the statistics are
tricky things, and you have to keep that in mind

(16:32):
whenever you're talking about any statistical increase. But it does
mean that you are really bringing putting yourself in severe
danger by being in contact with that stuff is not
good for you. UM and uh yeah. Part of the
problem there is how long how long these things last
in the environment. UM. For example, plutonium two thirty nine.

(16:54):
Half of any given bit of the stuff that we
handle today will still be harmful in two thousand years. Yeah,
so you know, obviously much worse than something like secondhand smoke.
You know, this is something that is persistent and unless
you have a way of containing it well away from humans,
it's going to potentially cause some really big problems. Right,

(17:15):
So you don't have to worry just about not being
in the same room with it yourself. You have to
worry about a thousand generations down the road not being
in the same room. Yeah. Then there's radiation sickness, which
not a fun thing to talk about. But the severity
of radiation sickness depends upon how much radiation you have absorbed,
and it's not common, but it is serious and often

(17:38):
fatal depending upon the exposure. So in your example of
walking unprotected into a room filled with high level waste,
that exposure would be pretty severe specifically, and getting more
severe every moment you spend in contact with that stuff.
So the determining factors are, like I said, the strength
of the radiated energy, which is quite high with high
level waste. How much does since was between you and

(18:01):
the radiation source. Some parts of our body are more
sensitive to radiation than other parts of our body, like
the gastro intestinal tract is really sensitive as his bone marrow.
Early symptoms are really unpleasant. They include nausea and vomiting.
Those symptoms will set up pretty much in a correlation

(18:22):
with how much exposure you had, So the more exposure
you had, the earlier the symptoms will show up. Um.
If it was a really severe case, then you might
be very sick within within an hour or two. At
most other cases where you might have had exposure but
it wasn't as severe, it may take a couple of
days before any symptoms show up. Um. We measure these

(18:43):
radiation dosages in a couple of different ways. There are
units that we call grays. Uh. An X ray tends
to be less than point one grays. It's also generally
focused on a small area of the body and X
ray is so it ends up being less of a
of a threat than say an all body exposure of
some powerful radioactive sources. So I give you that fancy

(19:06):
lead bib. Yeah, So again it really limits the area
that is exposed to this sort of thing. Um, and
then your symptoms of radiation sickness will usually appear only
after the entire body has absorbed one gray or more
of radio radioactivity. Doses greater than six gray are usually
not treatable and typically lead to death within two weeks. Now,

(19:27):
there's also another unit called the sivert, which you may
have heard of. Now. This is a unit of dose
equivalent which is used to relate the different effects from
various radiation types on the human body. So it accounts
for a quality factor, which is the type of radiation,
and a weighting factor, which was the type of tissue affected.
It's a little more specific than grays. In other words,
you should be getting the sense that not all radioactivity

(19:49):
is the same and not all radioactivity exposure will have
the same effect on your body right there. So it's
kind of hard to predict in certain cases what exactly
is going to have happened to you. But with this
high level waste, we know it is very dangerous. This
is this is also why it's important to know the
difference between ionizing radiation and non ionizing radiation. So high

(20:11):
level waste, we're talking ionizing radiation. This is dangerous stuff,
But there's other types of radiation that is non ionizing
for example, radio waves. So radio waves like the kind
that come from a cell phone tower are not ionizing radiation.
It's a they both radiate energy, but they are two
different types of radiation and should not be confused. All right,

(20:32):
So we've established there are different types of radiation. That
we have established are different types of radioactive waste, all
of which we need to figure out what to do
with them. So what do we do with them? What?
What typically is done with the stuff? Well, fortunately we
don't have to worry all that much when we we
still do have to be careful, we don't have to
worry all that much about the lower level wastes. Yes,

(20:54):
they're not intensely dangerous. You can typically just sort of
bury them in a what's called a civil nuclear waste facility. Yeah,
it's not that much different from say dump. Yeah, it's
it's a pit or a trench. Basically it's covered with
soil most of the time, so you you know, as
long as I mean, you might put a sign up

(21:15):
that's like, hey, don't eat the soil, right right, Yeah,
it's it's generally considered to be safe within the realm
of of safety. It's it's in there so it also
I think typically what's considered lower level waste also has
a shorter lifespan, right that it doesn't remain dangerous as long.

(21:36):
And also, while while it's very common for us to
see these in these these pits are trenches, particularly in
the United States, some other countries actually put low level
waste in depositories. So Finland and Sweden both have depositories
where they put low level and intermediate level waste UM,
which is that's going an extra mile for safety, or

(21:58):
at least an extra several um mill might be generous,
but it's uh, you know, it's it's going a step
further closer to what has been proposed for a high
level waste, but it's UM. It's interesting to me that
there are countries that are taking that extra step instead
of UH and stuff simply burying it, which from what

(22:20):
we can tell, seems to be adequate. Going up a
little bit from that, you've got the disposal of byproducts
like tailings, which is somewhere in between this low level
and what we're going to talk about in a moment,
which is the high level UM now. Now tailings here
in the United States of the uranium milling sites here

(22:40):
are inactive and are currently the responsibility of the Department
of Energy. Um so they are the ones that are
taking all of these steps for us, rather than the
private nuclear companies that may have opened the mind to
begin with. So they set up these sites that use
clay and rock to prevent seepage, and uh, you know,
put up signs and fences and legal land use restrictions.

(23:03):
There's an actual ep A web page that recommends that,
you know, really you should not misused tailings for construction
material or backfill around buildings. Well, that's that's a good note. Yeah.
Um so so people aren't. People aren't highly concerned about them,
is is all I'm saying. You know, like you can
you can go a few steps below what we're about

(23:24):
to talk about, which is that high level waste. Right, So,
the high level waste. We don't want to be too
much of a downer because there are certainly ways that
people have talked about dealing with this. What are those ways? Well,
you know, we talked about how when low level waste
the solution was to bury it. Yeah, right, turn that
up to eleven. And that's kind of the the most

(23:46):
agreed upon method for long term solution to high level
waste problems, And the reason why you need a long
term solution is that twenty four thousand years or so
that that's plutonium, and there's there are other ones that
have that that could be potentially dangerous for like a
hundred thousand years. That's a long time, right, and it's
difficult to build something out, especially, I mean right now,

(24:07):
most high level waste is stored I think we already
mentioned on site at nuclear facilities around any given country. Yes,
so if you have a nuclear plant that is an
operation somewhere in that general area, is also their containment
site for all the high level waste and spent nuclear
fuel that they're now that they're not trying to to
you know, repurpose in any way, right, But it would

(24:29):
be highly impractical to build at each of these nuclear
sites something so deep going and expensive that you would
be able to more permanently house this dangerous materials. So overall,
it is agreed upon that the best way to go
about storing nuclear the high level nuclear stuff would be
a centralized geological repository. And part of that is because

(24:51):
one identifying such a site, it takes time and effort
figuring out what sites are going to meet the requirements
so that you know, in a hundred thousand years time
it will still in theory be perfectly safe, or at
least be safely containing the high level waste. Secondly, you
have to figure out that it's much better to have

(25:14):
a centralized location, especially for something that could be attempting target,
for an organization that wants to get his hands on
nuclear material, it would be better to have that all
in a place where you could have the most maximum
security possible in that one location, as opposed to a
bunch of tempting targets that are all spread out all
over the place where some of them may be more

(25:37):
susceptible than others. This is a terrifying idea, but it's
one that has to be taken into consideration. It's one
of the things that factored into the idea of having
the centralized geological repositories. So it would need to be
buried really deep underground. We're talking several hundred meters several
like a thousand feet or so maybe around that area.

(25:58):
Some of them are deeper. Some of them are a
little less deep than that, but that's generally speaking what
we're looking at. Uh, it needs to have a lot
of reinforcement. We're talking about some shielding like steel and concrete,
maybe water even although that's very dangerous. You don't want
you don't want this leaking into the groundwater, right, You

(26:19):
don't want to contaminate any groundwater whatsoever. You don't want
to irradiate the groundwater because that could then affect all
sorts of life forms, right whether today or down the road.
So you want to try and make sure that it's airtight,
water tight. You don't want any radioactive dust to get
out of it, you don't want any water to get

(26:39):
into it. You want to make sure that it's really
secure from all sorts of of intrusions, whether human or otherwise.
And then there's there's the social factor, the social problem,
the political problem of geological repositories. So you have all
these considerations you have to make in order to even

(27:00):
find a site that's going to look useful. Then you
have to convince people that this is a good idea
and it should be put there, which is very hard
to do for the people who live in the general
vicinity of said proposed site. Oh yeah, it's it's hard
to even convince people to let you build a nuclear
facility period in their generalized neighborhood. And that's like like

(27:22):
you're going to get cheaper energy that will be awesome
for you. And this is just like your fish could
have three eyes. Yeah, it's it's I mean, it's it's
an understandable fear in the sense that radiation is scary. Right.
We cannot see it, but we know it affects us.
You know, we cannot we cannot actually see little wavy

(27:42):
lines coming out of this stuff that looks just like
rocks to us, you know, or or just a canister
of something or a big concrete container. We can't see
anything from it, and yet it can kill us. So
and it's it's really scientifically complicated. I mean, it kind
of goes along the lines of stuff that we don't
understand and is a lot scarier to us. And I
think that people, you know, see things in pop culture

(28:04):
about Godzilla, Mary Curry or you know, whatever it is,
and get extra freaked out. I mean, not that it's
not something that deserves to be freaked out about. I
think we had a big turnaround in our reaction. Like
if you look at those early nineteen forties, things like
the Miracle radiation and how it's gonna make you, well
the better place. And then I feel like it's earlier

(28:24):
in the forties with the I mean, when when were
people drinking radium water? I don't know about that, but
radiation was really that that became a popular thing in
the forties. I'm googling. But by the by the fifties
you get into the duck and cover stage. Hold on,
Let's see, in the early nineteen hundreds, radioactive water was
quite the rave. Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure you got

(28:47):
glowing reviews. Oh no, or are like painting the insides
of your watch with radium something? They would glow, et cetera. Yeah,
there's a lot of a lot of things where there
was a sort of this sort of craze about the
stuff until we start to more understand the potential hazards.
So at any rate, it suffers from the not in
my backyard problem also known as nimby, where people who

(29:11):
people may even say, I completely agree that we need this,
but I don't agree that we need it in my backyard. Yeah,
some somebody else do it. Yeah, Okay, so we all
think pretty much agree nuclear power great, you know, at
least potentially yeah, at the same time has this really
really serious problem. So we let's just do something about it.

(29:35):
Let's let's build all of the geological repositories we can.
How many do we already have for high level waste? Zero? Yeah? Zero? That,
by the way, that's that's around the world, that's not
just the United States. So we got to start with
the proposed geological geological repository for high level waste. There's one, Yeah,

(29:57):
the Yucka Mountain in Nevada. That was the big one.
And I say was because it's still kind of in
limbo right now. We'll get into that in a moment.
The mountains not in limbo. Mountains still in Nevada, but
the proposed process of actually trying it into a repository
limbo city could be like Welcome to night Vale, like
a little bit in limbo. It might be right, So,

(30:18):
um there, I do not know if there's an essentient
glow cloud over yuck A Mountain wouldn't surprise me at
this point. But it's been the intended repository for the
US since the nineties. And the thing is that Nevada
state representatives have really resisted this because the citizens of
Nevada really don't like the idea of a giant nuclear

(30:39):
waste dump in their state, no matter how you how
you define it, whether you say, look, this is a
facility that's meant to safely have all this, all the
geological features are ideal for this kind of thing. It's
a different story when you live a hundred and twenty
kilometers away. You know, Las Vegas is like within that distance.

(31:00):
And at the time when it was proposed, Las Vegas
was a smaller city than it is today. But now
it's it's relatively large. So you've got a very powerful
political resistance to putting it there. Um So meanwhile, to
make matters more complicated, might as well say this, now
you've got an equally powerful political uh push for it

(31:22):
to be established there. Because you've got all these other
nuclear power plants right across the United States, each of
which has to have a containment facility for those high
level wastes and spent nuclear fuel. They don't want to
keep that indefinitely. They're not supposed to keep it indefinitely.
That stuff is meant to go to a geological repository.
So they put political pressure for yucka Mountain to become

(31:43):
one of these things. So you've got the state of
Nevada resisting, You've got other states with existing nuclear facilities
saying no, we have to do this. That's what we
agreed upon. That was the agreement. Let's do it, um
And it's a big political nightmare, uh, for for very reasons.
Like we said, I mean, people are afraid of the
stuff because it's scary. So even if yuck a Mountain

(32:07):
got total clearance for licensing of becoming a geological repository,
we would not be using it until at the earliest.
And I don't think it's going to happen at all.
I don't think we're going to see it ever be
used as a repository. But okay, I looked into the
full back story of the Yuka Mountain thing because it's

(32:27):
such a interesting idea, and I think it's a pretty
good idea. But I don't live in Las Vegas, so
I mean, you know, it's it's a lot easier for
us to say it because we live from in Georgia,
a couple thousand miles away. Makes it a lot easier.
But okay, So way back in three a bunch of
private nuclear energy companies started working together to help create
one of these permanent centralized disposal sites UM. And meanwhile,

(32:50):
on the political side, Congress approved research into placing a
facility at Yucca Mountain among nine total potential sites in
seven That whole thing kicked off this multi decade debate
that Jonathan's been talking about about whether the good people
of Nevada would actually want such a thing and whether
we had the money to pour into a ten thousand

(33:11):
years safe, ninety billion dollar site of this type. UM.
In two thou To Yucco was designated as the best
possible site for a disposal facility. But soon after, in
two thousand and eight, the Obama administration started working to
shut the whole thing down because of this whole not
in my backyard and or funding debate stuff that was

(33:33):
going on. Uh. And then in the Department of Energy
stopped the entire process of attempting to license the site. UM.
Then the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board said, Uh, you
can't do that. By law, you can't just stop this.
You have to actually pass legislation one way or the other.

(33:56):
You can't you can't be doing something that you've been
legally bound to do. And then say I'm not doing
it anymore, so that essentially we're talking about different government
offices fighting with each other, which always leads terrific things. Um. Finally,
in the d C Court of Appeals, Washington, d C.
That would be ruled that the process had to go

(34:18):
forward legally speaking, being that the temporary thirty year safe
facilities that are currently holding our nation's nuclear waste are
insufficient um and cannot be extended for longer use without
a really costly detailed analysis of the potential damage that
doing so will cause. Right if we if you know,

(34:38):
the facilities that nuclear waste isn't right now, those weren't
meant to be permanent homes for that stuff, right. They
were meant to be this little temporary holding ground until
we had a centralized geological repository where everything would go,
and it was meant to be there, uh, for ten
thousand years. We'll talk more about that ten thousand year

(34:59):
thing in a little it too, so not a little
bit in the next in the next podcast, we'll talk
about it. Yeah, I'm sorry, um, but it's you know,
that's that's certainly one of the big tripping points of
this whole process is the idea of having a facility
where you have to designate it being safe for ten
thousand years. That's a tough thing. Uh. So yeah, it's

(35:20):
it's this is, like I said, a big political problem
as well as a technical problem, as well as a
health hazard. I mean, the multiple things coming into play here.
So yeah, I mean, what are we gonna do? And
we've got all these states that all have very different
ideas about what needs to happen. You've got the states
where the nuclear waste currently resides and cannot legally stay

(35:44):
there because the facilities that were built for them were
not meant to be permanent ones. I think a lot
of people honestly don't even realize it's there. Yeah, I
just have no idea that I think a lot of
people assume we already have facilities like yuck a MoU
is supposed to be. Yeah, and uh we will talk
more about all of that in our next episode, where

(36:07):
we'll go into more detail about the repositories that do
exist here in the world. Um, they're including one that
exists in the United States but is not a high
level waste repository. There are no high level waste repositories
out there, not yet. Anyway. Some of them are under
consideration in different parts of the world. Some of them
are under construction in different parts of the world, but

(36:28):
there are none existing yet. We will also talk about
some alternative proposals. Yes, there are many alternative proposals out there.
Some of them are bad, but some of them have
lots and lots of potential. And and I'm excited at
any rate about any of the work being done towards,
you know, not killing us all some of the bad ones.

(36:49):
Some of the bad ones have been considered and rejected.
Some of the bad ones have been practiced and rejected
once people caught onto what was going on. But we'll
talk all about that in our next episod, which will
be just as cheerful as this one was. So the
reason why we even tackled this problem in the first
place is that it's actually one we need to solve.
And and while it is a certain certainly a huge challenge,

(37:12):
and I'm sure I'll stress this again in our next episode,
human beings are amazing at overcoming challenges when we put
our minds to it. We have to put our minds
to it, is the thing. So it doesn't mean you
can just trust somebody to figure it out later. No, No,
we have to. Yeah, let's not fall back on the
someone smarter than me is working on this problem. No,

(37:33):
but but I think that all three people here are
pretty huge fans of nuclear energy, at least from among
the current options. Sure, if it's if it's practiced, if
it's practiced, uh, you know, responsibly, then certainly I think
it's a valid means of powering a nation, which means
that we need a valid means of taking care of

(37:54):
this waste because we do have to acknowledge that the
waste is an issue and we have to make sure
we we meet that problem. So we're going to talk
more about that in our next episode. Fear not, we'll
be we'll be continuing this discussion, and if you guys
have any suggestions for future topics we can talk about
on Forward Thinking, let us know. You can drop us

(38:14):
a line on Twitter, Google Plus, or Facebook or handle
at all three is f w Thinking and we will
talk to you again really soon. For more on this
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(38:41):
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