November 4, 2025 • 45 mins
You can make a case that it’s a little off-putting to learn the world doesn’t really have any idea what to do with the nuclear waste we’ve been generating for several decades. The best we’ve come up with so far is bury it real deep and forget about it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is a good
old fashioned episode of Stuff you Should Know.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
D D.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Are you talking about the Green Gow? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I mean it's just hard not to think of Homer
Simpson when you're talking about nuclear power at all.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah, and nuclear waste in particular.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Right, Yeah, Like you know that little Rod flies right
into his hood, right.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
This inanimate carbon Rod is the employee of the Year.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
I think that's right.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
So, yeah, it turns out that nuclear waste doesn't really
look like that. It certainly doesn't glow green. Probably the
closest you could get to what the Simpsons depict, and
not just the Simpsons, I think the classic movie Men
at Work featuring brothers Melio Estevez and Charlie Sheen.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Never saw it.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
It's good as far as eighties comedies.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Go, it's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
And they play a lot of two live crew too.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Oh well, there you go.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Because I think it takes place in Miami. I'm not sure.
But the closest you can get to that from what
I can tell, is a sludge toxic nuclear sludge that
is described as having kind of a peanut buttery consistency.
This is gross and dangerous, you know.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Yeah, it's not as sandwich you want unless you cut
the crust off.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
So for the most part, though, nuclear waste is solid,
it's like pellets of solid essentially metal material made up
of a bunch of different elements and metals and all
sorts of crud pressed together to form essentially a uranium
(01:59):
fuel what it starts out as, but after it undergoes
nuclear fission for five or six years, it says, I'm spent,
get me out of here, and a new fuel assembly
sprought in.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yeah, that's right. And this is clearly the most dangerous
kind of nuclear waste We're going to go over, you know,
several different kinds of nuclear waste, but this is the
stuff that you really really got to take care of.
I mean, you got to take care of all it,
of course, but this is stuff that's super dangerous, right,
And these pellets are these little cylinders about the size
(02:34):
I guess it depends on your thumb, but you know,
like midway up your thumb, half a thumb.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Okay, half thumb anything but metric.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Yeah, not the thumb stump, like the actual thumb print
section of your thumb, the thumb sprout, Yeah, the thumb
sprout exactly. And you know, disposing of this stuff is
sort of the highest level of concern because we have
to do it, so we don't there's not a place
in the world that has a permanent solution for this,
(03:07):
even though Finland is pretty close to you know, I'm
going to put air scare quotes as you call them,
around a permanent solution, because who knows what permanent means,
you know, in fifty thousand years, and we were going
to build one of these in twenty ten, and we'll
talk about why that didn't happen. But since the nineteen forties,
(03:27):
we've had a lot of different kinds of nuclear waste
to dispose of, and we've been getting rid of it
and storing it in a few different ways since then.
But there's a potentially a brighter future ahead with some
pretty ingenious ideas.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, fingers crossed, because right now we're going down the
road that was proposed a long time ago, and it's
kind of a dumb, unnecessary road, and hopefully smarter heads
will prevail. But yeah, we'll get into that later. But
one thing I thought was fascinating is that there is
way less nuclear waste than you would think, right. I
(04:02):
think something like if you took all of the nuclear
power that you used, you Chuck used for your entire
lifetime moment of birth.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Yep, the moment you die in a couple of years.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
All of it now far longer than that, I hope.
So all of that nuclear waste would be compressed to
about a hockey puck. So each of us in the
United States have a hockey puck worth of nuclear waste
assigned to us, and each of us has to figure
out what to do with that hockey puck individually. That's
the new standard.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
That's right. And by the way, if people think I
do have Chuck Stradama's powers of the future, please do
not get concerned that I foretold my death in two years.
It's okay, okay.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
I don't know if that erased it for everybody, but
all right. It was a good attempt.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
I could to hear someone out there being like, oh, no, no, no,
Chuck said he's going to die in two years. That's
he shan't even say things like that, Lest we forget
Jared and Hugh Jackman.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
I mean, I don't like you saying it, but you know,
I'm just I'm nervously laughing instead.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
All right, so we should kind of quickly go over
how nuclear reactors work, even though we have a pretty
great episode on that.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
But the upshot of all this is, even though each
of us just has a hockey pucks worth of nuclear
waste and it amounts to you, I think, like ninety
thousand tons, which is eye popping in the United States alone,
it's eye popping, but it's actually not that much. The
problem is, is it that it's very dangerous for a
very long time afterward, and you have to put it
(05:36):
in very very special places. And those special places are
essentially what we're gonna kind of go over today.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Yeah, disposing of that stuff. Yeah, we have a pretty
good episode on nuclear energy. I can't remember what it
was called, do you happen? Did you check that? I know?
Speaker 2 (05:57):
The only one I can think of where we really
talked about what happens in nuclear reactors was Fukushima.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
That kind of like I thought, we did one just
on creating nuclear energy.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Now I don't know, man, I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
All right, well we'll go over quickly again just how
it works, because it works how creating energy works at
a coal plant or a natural gas plant, because what
you're essentially trying to do is boil water to produce steam,
and that steam turns a turbine. But in this case,
the fuel is not coal or natural gas. It's these
(06:30):
little uranium two thirty five pellets, like I said, the
sort of a half of a thumb size. And you
mentioned fuel assembly, a fuel assembly, Well, you get these
little pellets, you put them inside these long fuel rods,
and then you bundle together those fuel rods and those
are the fuel assemblies. And depending on the size of
(06:51):
the reactor and the type, there's anywhere from one hundred
and fifty to about eight hundred of those bundled up
cylindrical fuel as fuel assemblies in the reactor.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Core, right, And they're kept underwater. And the water does
a couple of things. One, it actually helps carry out
the nuclear chain reaction that produces the heat that boils
the water, that produces the steam that turns the turbine
that creates the electricity, right, But it also keeps it
from going critical. It also cools it, so there's a
(07:23):
constant flow of water in and out to maintain it
at a fairly constant temperature at like one hundred and
fifteen fahrenheit or something like that. And what's great about
this is this is a it's a self contained process,
unlike burning natural gas or coal. There's no emissions. And
(07:44):
everybody says, hooray, no emissions, and then they say, yes,
but we also have this nuclear waste as a resultant,
and he says, oh, so that's where we stand. Nuclear
power has a lot of promise if done well, especially
with some of the advanced designs that are coming down
the Pike's not a bad energy source. It's just we
haven't figured out what to do with the nuclear fuel.
(08:07):
And that's such an understatement, Chuck that if you actually
once you start figuring out what we're doing with our
spent nuclear fuel, it's it's almost embarrassing that this is
what we're doing. We're just basically stashing it over here
until we can figure out what to do with it
in the long term. And we've been doing that for
half a century.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Yeah, yeah, it's been going on for a long time.
The thing is, you know, these things wear out, which
is why we have to remove you know, once you
spin that fuel, just like a lump of coal would
get spent. You got to do the same with the
nuclear stuff. So every I think five or six years
it can go before that's basically on empty. But it's
(08:48):
not on empty, as we'll see, because there's still a
little bit of juice left, just not enough to power
sort of the old school reactors. Right, So every year
and a half to two years, a nuclear reactor is
going to close the doors and they're gonna cycle through
about a third of their fuel assemblies and get rid
of those. And that is the really high level nuclear
(09:09):
waste that is the most concerning and the stuff that
we need to be the most judicious with.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yes, very fortunately they don't just take these fuel assemblies
and toss them out back into an ever growing pile.
They kind of do, but there's a little more to it.
What they do initially is so remember these things are underwater,
and they're underwater for a reason, not just for to
carry out the chain reaction that produces power, but also
(09:35):
to keep them from going critical. So they're moved from
the reactor core to what are called spent fuel pools
I want to say spent fuel puels. Every time I
say that out loud, but can't. So they and they
never leave the water. They're taken down these special canals
that connect the core, the reactor core, to the spent
(09:58):
fuel pools. And just to add a little charm to it,
they actually attach them to the bottom of a gondola
that it through the canal. It is very cute. And
then once they get to the spent fuel pool, they're
basically dropped into this huge pool, stainless steel pool that's
about has about forty feet of water in it, and
there I don't know, I think about ten feet or
(10:21):
so tall. So they sink down at the bottom and
they've got twenty thirty feet of water over them and
they stay there for years because they're so hot and
they're so radioactive, it would be insane to do anything
else with them, but basically put them in the pools
and let them sit there for a while.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah, you can look up a picture of a spent
fuel pool and it's really cool looking. And like you said,
I mean two to five years just for these things
to cool off. They decay a little bit as far
as the radioactivity goes, But you know, that's a process
that for the most critical stuff that takes you know,
thousands of years, so it's really just a blip of
(11:00):
radioactivity that decays in that two to five years. But
what they're really doing is cooling that stuff down, because
if they even pulled it out to transport it and
didn't do so in a canal, it seems like it
would just combust, right, isn't that the idea?
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah, a fuel assembly, especially a bunch of fuel assemblies
exposed to air, would just produce so much heat that
they would blow up. And when they blew up, remember
these are fairly recent spent fuel rods, they would release
a lot of really bad stuff like sasium one thirty
seven that spreads in the air very quickly, It settles
(11:35):
into the environment very quickly, it enters the food chain,
and it causes all sorts of problems when it enters
the body and it sticks around for a while. It's
one of the big problems with nuclear waste. So you
want to keep those spent fuel assemblies underwater for basically
as long as you possibly can before you put them
into basically dry dock. And this is where essentially what
(11:59):
I was saying, where they just toss them out back.
That's what they do, but they put them into something
called the dry cask first, and it's at a little
more technical than just throwing it into a pile, but
it's imprinciple roughly the same thing.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
That's very funny to me that you keep liking it
to throwing it out back in a pile.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Because that's what they're doing. Man. Like these dry casks.
It goes from a pool to a dry cask on
the same site and they just sit there in the
dry cask like, Okay, you stay here until we can
figure out what to do with you one hundred years
from now.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
So for the first couple of decades that we had
this stuff, all of it was just in those cooling pools.
But those pools started to fill up. They're all on site,
you know, it's not like they have to transport them
except you know, very locally via canal. And then they said, hey,
these pools are filling up. We got to come up
with a better way. They started looking into the dry
(12:54):
cask method in the seventies and I think in eighty
six in the United States at the Surrey Nuclear Power
Plant in Virginia is where we had our first dry
storage facility and these casks are about twenty feet tall,
eight feet in diameter the way about one hundred tons,
and in that cask is several dozen of those fuel assemblies.
And again those fuel assemblies are made up of the
(13:15):
individual fuel rods that are holding the pellets, So several
dozen of those stacked together sealed inside a canister. They
bolt it shut, suck out the air, and replace it
with the inert gas. And then that steel canister is
surrounded by a thick concrete wall and they throw it
out back right.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
They stand it up out back, and the inert gas
x as a coolant rather than using water, which would
corrode things. The inert gas can also absorb the radiation
and the heat. And then the concrete they use is
like very special concrete with polymer fibers and added boron
to make it even denser. And then they also mix
in magnetite and b baryte to essentially absorb radioactive particles.
(14:00):
So it's like the dry casks are pretty good as
far as I know, though they're only rated for about
one hundred years of storage. After that, they're like, we're
not guaranteeing anything. And so I think you said the
first one was sealed up in nineteen eighty six, So
we're at forty years essentially already ticking off the clock
(14:22):
for those earliest dry casks that were sealed, which, when
you start to think of it like that, like it
makes this like getting to a solution of what to
do long term permanent storage essentially how important it is
to do it as soon as possible, because if we
(14:43):
don't figure out exactly how to do it and then
start building it, that sixty years is going to come
and go quicker than we think. That's a long time
to design something that's one of probably the most persistent
problems that the world faces environmentally spent nuclear fuel.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Yeah, for sure. Right now, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission
NRC is looking at applications for a couple of larger
storage sites here in the US for those dry casts,
one in New Mexico and one in Texas. These are
called consolidated interim storage sites. Again because it's just you know, temporary,
(15:22):
and I think all over the world about seventy percent
of the fuel that's used up is in pools, about
thirty percent is in these dry casks, and you know,
these things supposedly are built to withstand natural disasters and
things like that. But like you said, like they're stored
either on or near the surface. It's not like they're
(15:44):
buried in bedrock, which is we'll see, is maybe a
more permanent solution. And in fact that's that's the one
that the US was working on inside the Yucka Mountain
and Nevada, and it had NRC and EPA approval, but
Nevada said, Nope, we don't want that here. Obama canceled
it in twenty ten, and so far we don't have
(16:06):
a new sort of again scare quote permanent solution here
in the US.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah, the big problem is in nineteen eighty seven, Congress
said Yucka Mountain is the only site that the DOE
and the NRC can use to dispose of nuclear waste.
You can't put it anywhere else geologically for long term storage.
And then they never went back and said, well, since
we're not going to put it Yucka Mountain, we'll do
(16:33):
it here instead. So it's just totally in limbo. So
in the interim literally, these interim storage sites, like you said,
in Texas and New Mexico, that's kind of the next
big hope after the dry casks. I think the one
in New Mexico will be capable of containing one hundred
and twenty thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel, which is
a lot, especially considering that the US has only about
(16:56):
ninety thousand tons of spent fuel total. But we're also
adding about two thousand tons a year, so in fifteen years,
New Mexico would be full up. So again, you kind
of see how this clock is ticking, because it's not
like anyone saying, well, let's wait on nuclear power any
further until we figure out what to do with this.
They're just it's just a go go go swinging kind
(17:17):
of industry.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
You know, maybe we should go go go on a break. Yeah,
and I promised talk of Finland earlier, and maybe we'll
pick up with that right after this good look up
with Joe shoe on cho.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Stuff.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
You shit, all right, So we mentioned Finland early on
as being kind of the only place in the world
now that is close to being done with a again
scare quote permanent solution. And the reason we keep saying
scare quotes is because you know, you sent me some
information that was like, hey, nobody knows what's going to
(18:04):
happen in thousands and thousands of years, so you can't
really call it permanent when there's climate change and potential
like asteroid impacts and things like that that like, we
just don't know what's coming our way, so you can't
really say it's permanent, but they're calling it permanent even so.
This one is called on Collo, which means cavity or pit,
(18:25):
and it's the first on planet Earth a geologic repository
where supposedly, you know, they say that you can store
this stuff, you know, close to fifteen hundred feet down
under the earth in the bedrock, and that stuff's been
there for millions of years, so this stuff should be
pretty good down there.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Yeah, And I mean they're like in the bedrock. They're
talking about fourteen hundred and thirty feet down, which for reference,
is two hundred and twenty times deeper than the depth
of an Olympic swimming pool. The spent fuel assemblies are
put into steal canisters and then just to show off,
Finland surrounds them with a two inch thick layer of
(19:05):
copper because copper won't corrode in the anaerobic conditions down
fourteen hundred and thirty feet under the ground. They're putting it.
Once they get to that fourteen hundred and thirty feet depth,
they go into shafts that are another thirty feet deep,
which is four point six times deeper than an Olympic pool,
and then they stack the canisters one on top of
each other. Finally they top off that thirty foot deep
(19:29):
shaft and then they fill them with bentonite, which is
a clever thing to add because it's it's compressed clay
that essentially remember those little dinosaur sponges that were really
tiny and then you drop water on them and they
turn into like a full size Tyrannosaurus rex. It's like that,
but it's the clay version of that. When it makes
contact with water, it expands, and as it expands, it
(19:51):
will form a seal around the canisters. And we just
have to hope that they did the math correctly and
it doesn't pop the cannisters open from the surrounding pressure.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Sure, I did not get the memo that we have
abandoned Big Max in favor of I guess Olympic pools.
What happened pool means nothing to me.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
I just you know, it's just six and a half
feet deep.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Oh okay, So they know it means something to me,
a big mac.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
I know it does, but I don't know. Okay, I'll
bring back the Big Max.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Well we don't. We can't pause for you to do
that mass.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
No, No, I mean in the future. Okay, okay, I'll
bring it back for you here there, all right, Okay.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
It's just a little worried. I thought maybe an email
got by me.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Well, Jerry commanded I leave the Big Max alone. I
think you were so really on that. Yeah, she said,
it's old Josh and tired.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Oh no, yeah, and you how about Olympic pools?
Speaker 2 (20:47):
She said, I don't care as long as it's not
Big Max.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
So that side in Finland can store three thousand canisters,
which is enough to handle Finland. They have five nuclear reactors,
and they said, hey, hey, the whole operational life of
these things, and we'll get to operational life of the
whole reactor site. Because you know, you can't make those
go forever either. You've got to shut those things down eventually.
(21:13):
But Finland can take care of all their business. They
said one hundred and twenty years or so to fill
that thing completely. It'll last one hundred thousand years, and
after one hundred thousand years. The idea is that it's
no longer radioactively dangerous.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Right, which is just wrong. It depends on what source
you go to, and it's not clear like ones from
one side and ones from another side. It really depends
on the source. Some people say nuclear waste is really
just dangerous for the first few decades, right. Other people
say one thousand years. Other people say tens of thousands
of years. Other people point out that an isotope of
(21:50):
uranium I think two thirty six or eight has a
half life of four point five billion years, So it
depends on who you talk to just how long the
stuff is really toxic for. But it seems like the
stuff that the people are most concerned of are things
like iodine one twenty nine, which has a half life
(22:11):
of fifteen million years. It's not good. But then on
the other hand, you have caesium one thirty one. I
think I mentioned earlier that that is really easy to
get into the environment, so it causes a lot of problems.
So does iodine one twenty nine, but it has a
half life of I think like thirty years, so as
long and a lot of the worst stuff actually goes
(22:32):
away while it's in those pools for the first few years.
So it really kind of depends on what element or
isotope you're worried about, whether it's safe after however many
years or not, or if it ever will be safe
under anything but geological deep time. You know.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Yeah, I wonder if they just said, I don't know,
one hundred thousand years sounds like a long time. Just
put that down.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
You know. You get the impression on some of this
that they are saying that because no one will care,
Like you would think that, I mean, this is some
really studied science, so you would think that it would
be like figures bandied about everywhere, like, oh, this is
how long nuclear waste is dangerous for, you know, and
this is why it's just all over the place. And
(23:17):
that actually is a little bit unnerving. So I think,
if anything, you should err on the side of caution,
which is I think what they're doing with the geological
repositories essentially is saying, put it as deep in the
earth as we possibly can, cover it up, walk away,
dusting your hands off, and pretend that it never even happened.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
You know. What I bet they do is they say
how many years in the future. Do you think people
no longer care about their future family line? Yeah, that's
like one hundred thousand years. Yeah, that's great. Put that down.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
I think it was one hundred and they just multiply
it to buy a thousand.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
All right, So we should talk a little bit about
other kinds of nuclear waste. We were talking about the
high level waste again, the most problematic obviously, that is
just three percent, though of total nuclear waste, but contributes
ninety five percent of the total radio activity. More than
ninety percent of nuclear waste is low level, and this
(24:13):
is stuff that you know, it might be like the
protective clothes that you wre on site. It's got a
little radioactive dust on it, maybe some tools, maybe some
disposable materials. We have four locations in the US for
disposing of this low level stuff, one in South Carolina
and one in Washington State, one in Utah, and one
in Texas. And this stuff is not nearly as problematic.
(24:36):
It decays to safe levels in about again, who knows
for sure, but about twenty to thirty years. Well, I
guess in that case they can test it out at
this point. But that's treated almost like a landfill. It's
in case in concrete and covered with backfill.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Yeah, so yeah, we don't really have to worry too
much about low level waste, I think is the upshot
of that, right. Yeah, there's also transuranic waste, which has
incredibly long half lives, and these are often called defense
wastes because they are produced when we produce plutonium for
nuclear weapons. So sometimes plutonium grabs on to some of
(25:15):
the neutrons we've bombarded with and says, oh, let me
form some neptunium, which has a half life of two
point one four million years, or how about some americium
or plutonium two thirty nine itself has a half life
of greater than twenty four thousand years. So this stuff
is really it's really dangerous, But at the same time,
(25:36):
it also is really fissile, meaning it's ready to go.
It's hit me with some more neutrons and let's split
some more atoms so we can release some more energy.
So it's not necessarily a problem if we can figure
out what to do with it. It's just that we
haven't quite figured out how to use it yet, so
in the meantime it gets dropped into the waste isolation
(25:59):
pilot play and for longtime listeners of the podcast, we're
those curious enough to go through the back catalog, which
is really great. We did an episode on nuclear semiotics,
remember that, oh yeah, which is essentially trying to figure
out how to communicate with people ten thousand years in
the future that the waste isolation pilot plant is really
dangerous and to steer clear of it. That was probably
(26:21):
one of my favorite all time episodes.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah, for sure, And you know, I'm glad you mentioned
that real quick, if we could just quickly say we
have many, many, many hundreds up to how many episodes
do we have a couple of thousand.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
If you include the short stuff it's coming up on
like twenty three hundred.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
I think, yeah, a lot of people like the reason
we mentioned this is we get emails every single day
where people like, you should do an episode on like
these five things, and we've done four of the five
of those, and so I think a lot of people
don't realize that. You know, we've been at this for
close to eighteen years, and so we have a vast
repository of things. And if you go to your podcast player,
(27:00):
I know on Apple podcasts, there's a little button you
can click at the bottom that says show all episodes. Yeah,
so go forth and listen. And in fact, we did
have one from twenty fourteen called can nuclear fusion Reactors
Save the World?
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah, so that was a good one too. I love
that one. That's different than this.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Yeah, that's different than this anyway. Lots of good back
catalog episodes, so we encourage you to seek them out.
A little googling can go a long way as well.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Yeah, and our webmaster, Brandon Reid, has put together a
world class search engine on our site, stuffyshould know dot com.
So if you type in any keyword of something you're
looking for, it's probably going to bring up bad episode,
maybe some other episodes that we cover that in, and
then you can listen to it right there on the
site too. So yeah, we do have a very deep
(27:48):
back catalog. It's almost geologic in its stretch.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
How many Olympic pools deep? Is it?
Speaker 2 (27:55):
At least ten to fifteen million? I would say.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Okay, so back to the waste isolated pilot plant in
New Mexico. Here they bury this transuranic Is that how
you said it?
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Okay inside a salt layer. That's a couple of thousand
feet below the surface, and salt doesn't have any maybe
a little bit, but basically no groundwater flow. And you know,
water's your enemy as far as a corrosive agent with
all this stuff. But the salt is going to form
a seal, just sort of like that clay did around
(28:27):
those canisters. And that's what we do with that stuff.
And I mentioned, you know, decommissioning entire nuclear power plants
and reactors. That's something that you have to do because,
like I said, these things, you can't just keep tightening
the bolts on these and expect it to keep running.
I think, in fact, in the United States, sixty years
is like the maximum limit before they say shut this
(28:49):
thing down.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, And strangely I did not realize this, but most
of the contaminated stuff is low level waste, like you know,
hazard suits and stuff like that. And even the concrete
that the whole power plan is made from. I saw
that only about one percent of it is radioactive. The
rest can just be treated as construction waste. Essentially. I
(29:11):
saw a proposal saying like, don't do that, like reuse
this stuff as the concrete, like recycle it as the
concrete that seals in the dry casks and stuff like that.
So there's actually there seems to be much more of
a push to recycle all this stuff, as we'll see.
But there's a whole process to decommissioning, and one of
(29:32):
the parts of this process is making sure all those
fuel assemblies spend or otherwise end up in the cooling
pool and then when it's their time to dry casks.
So what's interesting is a whole power plan will be
taken offline decommission. It's not producing power any longer, but
it still has all those fuel rods, and it's spent
fuel pool, it still has dry casks out back, and
(29:53):
there's still people watching over that stuff because we don't
have anywhere to put it. We're literally leaving them in
spent fuel pools after we turn the power off on
the nuclear power plants. That's what we're doing with our
nuclear waste right now.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Yeah, and there's that water in the pools. Like let's
say you finally get all of them out of the
pool and in dry cask, then you got a big
pool of I imagine, very soothing nuclear water that was
used as a coolant, and you got to do something
with that and what we do with it, And I
guess you know what's basically done with it all over
(30:29):
the world is it's cleaned and then dumped into a waterway,
an ocean or a river or a lake. And most
of these plants are by a body of water for
this reason. And you know, we'll talk a little bit
about how this is done, the two main processes. But
I'm not like a conspiracy guy or hugely cynical, but
(30:50):
I just don't see how that water can ever be
good enough to dump into an ocean or a lake.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
The only thing I've seen is dilution that full first
of all, so they filter out as much of the
radio nuclides as possible, right, Yeah, and there's whole processes
for separating those things out from the water, but there's
still some left. But their premise is that they're adding
so much fresh water to it. Yeah, before they dump
it into the ocean. It's fine. But I think that's
(31:16):
a very valid point. Like we're talking about nuclear science here,
and this is how far behind the environmental part of
nuclear science is lagging that we're just like, it's fine,
forget about it, We're just gonna dump it in the
ocean and yes, it's not so bad that they're not
treating it first and diluting it first, but it's still
(31:39):
it's like, really, that's what we can do. That's the
best we can do right now. And the answer is.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yes, yeah, I mean that's Uh, if I don't mention
the three eyed fish on the Simpsons, we're gonna get emails.
I guess that we have to mention that, right you bet?
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Man.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Did that fish have a named blinky?
Speaker 2 (31:56):
I think, Oh really, I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
Didn't it blink? In sequence? Yeah, like pink pink pink. Yeah,
that's very funny.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
That was a pretty cool fish.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Uh yeah. So that's that's what happens to the water.
So maybe we should take our second break here and
talk about a bit of a brighter future with ideas
for recycling and more. Right after this, goods.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Up with jaw shoe on chow out stuff fish. Okay, check.
So I think I said that there's kind of a
new spirit of recycling that's kind of starting to sweep
the nuclear industry as far as environmental aspects are concerned.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Right, yeah, like you can recycle this stuff.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Yeah, Because there's a couple of things. One is where
when a nuclear fuel rod is spent, it still has
like like a lot of energy left in it. It's
just like you said, not enough energy to power an
old school nuclear reactor. So one solution is to develop
(33:11):
more advanced reactors that can use those same things as fuel.
They're just much more sensitive. Another thing is to take
those and recycle them, like extract the usable stuff out
of it, form new pellets and just start the cycle again.
And you're doing a couple of cool things here. One,
(33:32):
you're taking out the most dangerous part of the radioactive
nuclear waste and leaving behind far less dangerous waste that
you still have to figure out what to do with,
but it's not nearly as bad as the stuff that
you took out of it. And then you're also reusing
power that otherwise under the current plans of just bury
and forget it, you're burying all of that energy. There's
(33:56):
so much energy. There's a startup called oakloh and they
they estimate that the unused spent fuel that we're talking
about just burying thousands of feet under the ground could
power the United States, the entire United States for the
next one hundred and fifty years, just with the spent
nuclear fuel we have right now, and the idea is
(34:19):
to just bury and forget about it. And it's so
stupid that it actually could be considered a lucky break
that Yucca Mountain didn't work out back in twenty ten,
and it's in limbo because it bought time for people
to come up with other ideas rather than just bury
the stuff that's just such a total waste.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Yeah, Oaklo says they can recycle and reuse ninety four
percent of uranium in those spent fuel assemblies, and they're
just one of ten companies. I think they got a
license from the Department of Energy to build a recycling
plant in Oakridge, Tennessee. Shout out to the boys. Sure,
and they're one of ten companies that the Department of
en selected as part of their reactor Pilot program to
(35:04):
build these new reactors that can be powered by recycled uranium.
So that seems like a great way forward. One of
the concerns here is that you know there is a
security risk even though like that stuff is again, like
you said, spent, if you can recycle it to use again,
even in that small quantity of unspentness, you could also
(35:28):
make a dirty bomb. Or something for that, so it
needs to be pretty pretty locked down.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
And the same fear, except even worse, is associated with
extracting plutonium from spent nuclear fuel to use that because
that is the core of a nuclear weapon, and that's
the kind of thing that a foreign country that doesn't
have a nuclear program but really wants one has the
resources to steal from some startup that is refining and
(35:59):
extracting their facility in Tennessee. That's a huge that's actually,
from what I can tell, the number one obstacle to
recycling nuclear waste that security concern.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yeah, I mean they could fix that though.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
I guess. I mean, we keep our nuclear stockpile safe,
or we have for this long, so why can't we
apply some of that same security to these recycling plants.
I don't understand. It just seems like, a yeah, that's
a huge risk, but it's not something we can't figure out,
you know.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
Well, I feel like it probably have to be in
working in concert with the government and not just saying
like all right, Oaklow, you got your security team. I
see those people with the black eyes odds on, It's
all good.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Yeah. So one of the other things we should say,
I think that people are kind of wary about is
that these startups that are talking about new ideas for
nuclear power are typically doing it to get government buy
in to help fund them to build nuclear plants to
power their AI. So these are like like I think
(37:06):
Oaklo is backed by Sam Altman from Open AI. Essentially
humanity would benefit as a side effect from new advanced
designs for producing nuclear power with less waste. That'd be great,
But the intent, the immediate intent by the people who
are doing this is typically to produce cheaper power to
(37:26):
power their increasingly massive artificial intelligences. That's I think makes
some people wary, including me.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Yeah, I mean combining those businesses is a little it's
a little worrisome.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
It is. And I can't let an opportunity pass to
shout out. If anyone builds it, everyone dies. By Eliezer
Yukowski and Nate Sores, it's so good where they just
lay out a very straightforward example of how AI could
just get out of control and how we humans would
be in big trouble. And yet it's it's not like
they're AI haters. They're just basically saying, like, we're going
(38:03):
at this at such a terrible pace so recklessly that
we need to put the brakes on globally and figure
out how to do it safely and then do it
and then humanity can benefit from it. So they're not
like lightites or anything like that, and they know what
they're talking about. It's just a good book.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Yeah, well, you know, with things how things are going
these days, I could use little pick me up, so
maybe a little light reading. Maybe I'll start that again.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
It is like you could read it in a day, man.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
A very depressing day.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
It's good though. It's really interesting too because it's also
a peek inside the current state of the AI industry too,
Like they're insiders, they know what's going on all right.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
So I mentioned earlier these deep geological repositories that they've
almost finished in Finland, Like those aren't the best idea
because who knows what's going to happen long term here
on planet Earth. But they are, you know, extracting the
most highly radioactive parts of this waste from everything else else.
Seems like that's headed toward a pretty a pretty good solution.
(39:06):
So they don't know quite what to do with it afterward.
But one way of doing it is something called transmutation, right.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Yeah, I thought this was kind of genius. So essentially
it's taking the extracted most radioactive parts of nuclear waste
and tossing it into a particle accelerator and bombarding it
with neutrons, and by doing so you actually either you
either change them a neutron knocks them proton or some
(39:34):
something off of one of these off of each of
these atoms and converts it into something far less radioactive
that might decay much more quickly, or they grab onto
a neutron and they transform in that way and become
something that might be much more stable that isn't radioactive
at all. And so you're taking the really radioactive stuff
(39:55):
and you're degrading it really quickly in a particle accelerator,
and if you do it correct Flea, I guess in principle,
I think all of this is theoretical right now, Yeah,
you could actually produce energy while you're doing this, So
while you're getting rid of waste, you could be producing
energy from the bombardment bombardment.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
I love this thought process. Another one that holds a
lot of promise is actually glass and ceramics. Glass and
ceramics can both trap those radio nuclides that you were
talking about, and for like a long period of time,
and you know, the idea is that you store this
stuff in these like like glass logs or ceramic logs. Basically,
(40:38):
glass doesn't degrade very easily, forms a very tight bond
that's kind of like a force field that says nothing's
getting in or getting out. It's a process called vitrification.
But it's not just regular old glass. It's like, you know,
sort of heavy duty nuclear containing glass.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Yeah, and what's cool about it is the glass law
uggs don't act as like container that you put waste in.
You melt the glass, making minerals and the waste together
and it forms the glass log together, so like you're
actually trapping the radioactive particles in glass, not inside glass
as part of glass. It's really genius.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
Yeah, yeah, I thought that was clear. But yeah, it's
thanks for clearing that up.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
You're welcome. And you can also do the same thing
with ceramics too, apparently.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Yeah, ceramics work just as good. We can also re
recycle the fistle material we're trying to you know, the
gold there is to recover uranium and plutonium, the main
materials main fissle materials and again separating out the most
radioactive parts of the waste product. Is what you're doing,
(41:46):
is you're trying just to make it all less bad,
less radioactive for.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
Sure, and then hopefully doing something with it, like turning
it back into pellets like I saw to make a
mixed uranium plutonium oxide MOX fuel, you can use eight
old pellets to create one new one, so it actually
is pretty efficient, and you can keep doing that over
and over again until essentially you just don't have enough
(42:13):
left to actually produce any energy. And one of the
other points that I saw, Chuck, is that even if
we can't figure out how to reuse the fuel that
we've isolated and extracted from the spent nuclear fuel waste,
just being able to do that would reduce it by
so much that it would take a huge amount of
(42:35):
our problem for figuring out what to do with the
waste off of the table. So like, if that stuff
is one percent of all nuclear waste and the United
States has ninety thousand tons of it, that would drop
it down to just nine hundred tons of really problematic
stuff that we had to figure out how to get
rid of ninety thousand so there's I mean, aside from
that security risk thing, there's really no reason not to
(42:58):
process nuclear ways to get the high energy stuff out
of there for one reason or another.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
Yeah, for sure, I think that's it.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Man.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Yeah, go forth and recycle your uranium pellets in your home.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
That's right, Chuck. And since Chuck talked about recycling uranium pellets,
obviously it's time for listener man.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
This is from Kelly Gizmondi. Hey, guys, I'm a lawyer
in Louisiana, started listening to Stuff You Should a few
years ago and currently working my way through the back
log and enjoying every minute. Just got done listening to
your solitary confinement episode and was thrilled to hear you
talk about the Angola Three. I have represented folks from
Angola and one of the most interesting stories from Angola
(43:42):
that was recently published by Calvin Duncan, who was wrongfully convicted.
By the way, It's called The Jailhouse Lawyer, which is
a deep dive into what life is like for inmate counsel.
Inmate counsel or a group of incarcerated folks who learn
and then teach others the law, draft motions and legal
islings for others who are incarcerated and help advocate for
(44:03):
those incarcerated as a whole. This is an essential service
for the incarcerated community because there is no right to
precuncel for post conviction relief, and many people who have
been convicted of crimes cannot afford legal fees for post
conviction relief. Man Essentially, if you are poor and have
been wrongfully convicted of a crime, or if there's another
legal issue with your conviction, often the only way to
(44:25):
get legal help is to work with inmate counsel. They're
incredibly effective and have helped get thousands of incarcerated folks
across Louisiana home to their communities. Would love to hear
an episode on this. Thanks for all you do for
my brain. That is sincerely from Kelly GISMONDI and Kelly,
that may be a good short stuff. There's not a
ton out there, but I bet you we could find
(44:47):
fifteen minutes easy.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
Yeah, let's do it, man, because that is definitely as
far as I'm concerned, and overlooked issue and the justice
system for sure.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Well, God bless you Kelly for what you're doing, your
work helping people who may have gotten screwed over by
the system. And if you want to be like Kelly
and email us to let us know what you're doing
to help your fellow person we want to hear about that.
You can send it to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is a good
old fashioned episode of Stuff you Should Know.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
D D.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Are you talking about the Green Gow? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I mean it's just hard not to think of Homer
Simpson when you're talking about nuclear power at all.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah, and nuclear waste in particular.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Right, Yeah, Like you know that little Rod flies right
into his hood, right.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
This inanimate carbon Rod is the employee of the Year.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
I think that's right.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
So, yeah, it turns out that nuclear waste doesn't really
look like that. It certainly doesn't glow green. Probably the
closest you could get to what the Simpsons depict, and
not just the Simpsons, I think the classic movie Men
at Work featuring brothers Melio Estevez and Charlie Sheen.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Never saw it.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
It's good as far as eighties comedies.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Go, it's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
And they play a lot of two live crew too.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Oh well, there you go.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Because I think it takes place in Miami. I'm not sure.
But the closest you can get to that from what
I can tell, is a sludge toxic nuclear sludge that
is described as having kind of a peanut buttery consistency.
This is gross and dangerous, you know.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Yeah, it's not as sandwich you want unless you cut
the crust off.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
So for the most part, though, nuclear waste is solid,
it's like pellets of solid essentially metal material made up
of a bunch of different elements and metals and all
sorts of crud pressed together to form essentially a uranium
(01:59):
fuel what it starts out as, but after it undergoes
nuclear fission for five or six years, it says, I'm spent,
get me out of here, and a new fuel assembly
sprought in.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yeah, that's right. And this is clearly the most dangerous
kind of nuclear waste We're going to go over, you know,
several different kinds of nuclear waste, but this is the
stuff that you really really got to take care of.
I mean, you got to take care of all it,
of course, but this is stuff that's super dangerous, right,
And these pellets are these little cylinders about the size
(02:34):
I guess it depends on your thumb, but you know,
like midway up your thumb, half a thumb.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Okay, half thumb anything but metric.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Yeah, not the thumb stump, like the actual thumb print
section of your thumb, the thumb sprout, Yeah, the thumb
sprout exactly. And you know, disposing of this stuff is
sort of the highest level of concern because we have
to do it, so we don't there's not a place
in the world that has a permanent solution for this,
(03:07):
even though Finland is pretty close to you know, I'm
going to put air scare quotes as you call them,
around a permanent solution, because who knows what permanent means,
you know, in fifty thousand years, and we were going
to build one of these in twenty ten, and we'll
talk about why that didn't happen. But since the nineteen forties,
(03:27):
we've had a lot of different kinds of nuclear waste
to dispose of, and we've been getting rid of it
and storing it in a few different ways since then.
But there's a potentially a brighter future ahead with some
pretty ingenious ideas.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, fingers crossed, because right now we're going down the
road that was proposed a long time ago, and it's
kind of a dumb, unnecessary road, and hopefully smarter heads
will prevail. But yeah, we'll get into that later. But
one thing I thought was fascinating is that there is
way less nuclear waste than you would think, right. I
(04:02):
think something like if you took all of the nuclear
power that you used, you Chuck used for your entire
lifetime moment of birth.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Yep, the moment you die in a couple of years.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
All of it now far longer than that, I hope.
So all of that nuclear waste would be compressed to
about a hockey puck. So each of us in the
United States have a hockey puck worth of nuclear waste
assigned to us, and each of us has to figure
out what to do with that hockey puck individually. That's
the new standard.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
That's right. And by the way, if people think I
do have Chuck Stradama's powers of the future, please do
not get concerned that I foretold my death in two years.
It's okay, okay.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
I don't know if that erased it for everybody, but
all right. It was a good attempt.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
I could to hear someone out there being like, oh, no, no, no,
Chuck said he's going to die in two years. That's
he shan't even say things like that, Lest we forget
Jared and Hugh Jackman.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
I mean, I don't like you saying it, but you know,
I'm just I'm nervously laughing instead.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
All right, so we should kind of quickly go over
how nuclear reactors work, even though we have a pretty
great episode on that.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
But the upshot of all this is, even though each
of us just has a hockey pucks worth of nuclear
waste and it amounts to you, I think, like ninety
thousand tons, which is eye popping in the United States alone,
it's eye popping, but it's actually not that much. The
problem is, is it that it's very dangerous for a
very long time afterward, and you have to put it
(05:36):
in very very special places. And those special places are
essentially what we're gonna kind of go over today.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Yeah, disposing of that stuff. Yeah, we have a pretty
good episode on nuclear energy. I can't remember what it
was called, do you happen? Did you check that? I know?
Speaker 2 (05:57):
The only one I can think of where we really
talked about what happens in nuclear reactors was Fukushima.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
That kind of like I thought, we did one just
on creating nuclear energy.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Now I don't know, man, I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
All right, well we'll go over quickly again just how
it works, because it works how creating energy works at
a coal plant or a natural gas plant, because what
you're essentially trying to do is boil water to produce steam,
and that steam turns a turbine. But in this case,
the fuel is not coal or natural gas. It's these
(06:30):
little uranium two thirty five pellets, like I said, the
sort of a half of a thumb size. And you
mentioned fuel assembly, a fuel assembly, Well, you get these
little pellets, you put them inside these long fuel rods,
and then you bundle together those fuel rods and those
are the fuel assemblies. And depending on the size of
(06:51):
the reactor and the type, there's anywhere from one hundred
and fifty to about eight hundred of those bundled up
cylindrical fuel as fuel assemblies in the reactor.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Core, right, And they're kept underwater. And the water does
a couple of things. One, it actually helps carry out
the nuclear chain reaction that produces the heat that boils
the water, that produces the steam that turns the turbine
that creates the electricity, right, But it also keeps it
from going critical. It also cools it, so there's a
(07:23):
constant flow of water in and out to maintain it
at a fairly constant temperature at like one hundred and
fifteen fahrenheit or something like that. And what's great about
this is this is a it's a self contained process,
unlike burning natural gas or coal. There's no emissions. And
(07:44):
everybody says, hooray, no emissions, and then they say, yes,
but we also have this nuclear waste as a resultant,
and he says, oh, so that's where we stand. Nuclear
power has a lot of promise if done well, especially
with some of the advanced designs that are coming down
the Pike's not a bad energy source. It's just we
haven't figured out what to do with the nuclear fuel.
(08:07):
And that's such an understatement, Chuck that if you actually
once you start figuring out what we're doing with our
spent nuclear fuel, it's it's almost embarrassing that this is
what we're doing. We're just basically stashing it over here
until we can figure out what to do with it
in the long term. And we've been doing that for
half a century.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Yeah, yeah, it's been going on for a long time.
The thing is, you know, these things wear out, which
is why we have to remove you know, once you
spin that fuel, just like a lump of coal would
get spent. You got to do the same with the
nuclear stuff. So every I think five or six years
it can go before that's basically on empty. But it's
(08:48):
not on empty, as we'll see, because there's still a
little bit of juice left, just not enough to power
sort of the old school reactors. Right, So every year
and a half to two years, a nuclear reactor is
going to close the doors and they're gonna cycle through
about a third of their fuel assemblies and get rid
of those. And that is the really high level nuclear
(09:09):
waste that is the most concerning and the stuff that
we need to be the most judicious with.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yes, very fortunately they don't just take these fuel assemblies
and toss them out back into an ever growing pile.
They kind of do, but there's a little more to it.
What they do initially is so remember these things are underwater,
and they're underwater for a reason, not just for to
carry out the chain reaction that produces power, but also
(09:35):
to keep them from going critical. So they're moved from
the reactor core to what are called spent fuel pools
I want to say spent fuel puels. Every time I
say that out loud, but can't. So they and they
never leave the water. They're taken down these special canals
that connect the core, the reactor core, to the spent
(09:58):
fuel pools. And just to add a little charm to it,
they actually attach them to the bottom of a gondola
that it through the canal. It is very cute. And
then once they get to the spent fuel pool, they're
basically dropped into this huge pool, stainless steel pool that's
about has about forty feet of water in it, and
there I don't know, I think about ten feet or
(10:21):
so tall. So they sink down at the bottom and
they've got twenty thirty feet of water over them and
they stay there for years because they're so hot and
they're so radioactive, it would be insane to do anything
else with them, but basically put them in the pools
and let them sit there for a while.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah, you can look up a picture of a spent
fuel pool and it's really cool looking. And like you said,
I mean two to five years just for these things
to cool off. They decay a little bit as far
as the radioactivity goes, But you know, that's a process
that for the most critical stuff that takes you know,
thousands of years, so it's really just a blip of
(11:00):
radioactivity that decays in that two to five years. But
what they're really doing is cooling that stuff down, because
if they even pulled it out to transport it and
didn't do so in a canal, it seems like it
would just combust, right, isn't that the idea?
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah, a fuel assembly, especially a bunch of fuel assemblies
exposed to air, would just produce so much heat that
they would blow up. And when they blew up, remember
these are fairly recent spent fuel rods, they would release
a lot of really bad stuff like sasium one thirty
seven that spreads in the air very quickly, It settles
(11:35):
into the environment very quickly, it enters the food chain,
and it causes all sorts of problems when it enters
the body and it sticks around for a while. It's
one of the big problems with nuclear waste. So you
want to keep those spent fuel assemblies underwater for basically
as long as you possibly can before you put them
into basically dry dock. And this is where essentially what
(11:59):
I was saying, where they just toss them out back.
That's what they do, but they put them into something
called the dry cask first, and it's at a little
more technical than just throwing it into a pile, but
it's imprinciple roughly the same thing.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
That's very funny to me that you keep liking it
to throwing it out back in a pile.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Because that's what they're doing. Man. Like these dry casks.
It goes from a pool to a dry cask on
the same site and they just sit there in the
dry cask like, Okay, you stay here until we can
figure out what to do with you one hundred years
from now.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
So for the first couple of decades that we had
this stuff, all of it was just in those cooling pools.
But those pools started to fill up. They're all on site,
you know, it's not like they have to transport them
except you know, very locally via canal. And then they said, hey,
these pools are filling up. We got to come up
with a better way. They started looking into the dry
(12:54):
cask method in the seventies and I think in eighty
six in the United States at the Surrey Nuclear Power
Plant in Virginia is where we had our first dry
storage facility and these casks are about twenty feet tall,
eight feet in diameter the way about one hundred tons,
and in that cask is several dozen of those fuel assemblies.
And again those fuel assemblies are made up of the
(13:15):
individual fuel rods that are holding the pellets, So several
dozen of those stacked together sealed inside a canister. They
bolt it shut, suck out the air, and replace it
with the inert gas. And then that steel canister is
surrounded by a thick concrete wall and they throw it
out back right.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
They stand it up out back, and the inert gas
x as a coolant rather than using water, which would
corrode things. The inert gas can also absorb the radiation
and the heat. And then the concrete they use is
like very special concrete with polymer fibers and added boron
to make it even denser. And then they also mix
in magnetite and b baryte to essentially absorb radioactive particles.
(14:00):
So it's like the dry casks are pretty good as
far as I know, though they're only rated for about
one hundred years of storage. After that, they're like, we're
not guaranteeing anything. And so I think you said the
first one was sealed up in nineteen eighty six, So
we're at forty years essentially already ticking off the clock
(14:22):
for those earliest dry casks that were sealed, which, when
you start to think of it like that, like it
makes this like getting to a solution of what to
do long term permanent storage essentially how important it is
to do it as soon as possible, because if we
(14:43):
don't figure out exactly how to do it and then
start building it, that sixty years is going to come
and go quicker than we think. That's a long time
to design something that's one of probably the most persistent
problems that the world faces environmentally spent nuclear fuel.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Yeah, for sure. Right now, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission
NRC is looking at applications for a couple of larger
storage sites here in the US for those dry casts,
one in New Mexico and one in Texas. These are
called consolidated interim storage sites. Again because it's just you know, temporary,
(15:22):
and I think all over the world about seventy percent
of the fuel that's used up is in pools, about
thirty percent is in these dry casks, and you know,
these things supposedly are built to withstand natural disasters and
things like that. But like you said, like they're stored
either on or near the surface. It's not like they're
(15:44):
buried in bedrock, which is we'll see, is maybe a
more permanent solution. And in fact that's that's the one
that the US was working on inside the Yucka Mountain
and Nevada, and it had NRC and EPA approval, but
Nevada said, Nope, we don't want that here. Obama canceled
it in twenty ten, and so far we don't have
(16:06):
a new sort of again scare quote permanent solution here
in the US.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah, the big problem is in nineteen eighty seven, Congress
said Yucka Mountain is the only site that the DOE
and the NRC can use to dispose of nuclear waste.
You can't put it anywhere else geologically for long term storage.
And then they never went back and said, well, since
we're not going to put it Yucka Mountain, we'll do
(16:33):
it here instead. So it's just totally in limbo. So
in the interim literally, these interim storage sites, like you said,
in Texas and New Mexico, that's kind of the next
big hope after the dry casks. I think the one
in New Mexico will be capable of containing one hundred
and twenty thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel, which is
a lot, especially considering that the US has only about
(16:56):
ninety thousand tons of spent fuel total. But we're also
adding about two thousand tons a year, so in fifteen years,
New Mexico would be full up. So again, you kind
of see how this clock is ticking, because it's not
like anyone saying, well, let's wait on nuclear power any
further until we figure out what to do with this.
They're just it's just a go go go swinging kind
(17:17):
of industry.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
You know, maybe we should go go go on a break. Yeah,
and I promised talk of Finland earlier, and maybe we'll
pick up with that right after this good look up
with Joe shoe on cho.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Stuff.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
You shit, all right, So we mentioned Finland early on
as being kind of the only place in the world
now that is close to being done with a again
scare quote permanent solution. And the reason we keep saying
scare quotes is because you know, you sent me some
information that was like, hey, nobody knows what's going to
(18:04):
happen in thousands and thousands of years, so you can't
really call it permanent when there's climate change and potential
like asteroid impacts and things like that that like, we
just don't know what's coming our way, so you can't
really say it's permanent, but they're calling it permanent even so.
This one is called on Collo, which means cavity or pit,
(18:25):
and it's the first on planet Earth a geologic repository
where supposedly, you know, they say that you can store
this stuff, you know, close to fifteen hundred feet down
under the earth in the bedrock, and that stuff's been
there for millions of years, so this stuff should be
pretty good down there.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Yeah, And I mean they're like in the bedrock. They're
talking about fourteen hundred and thirty feet down, which for reference,
is two hundred and twenty times deeper than the depth
of an Olympic swimming pool. The spent fuel assemblies are
put into steal canisters and then just to show off,
Finland surrounds them with a two inch thick layer of
(19:05):
copper because copper won't corrode in the anaerobic conditions down
fourteen hundred and thirty feet under the ground. They're putting it.
Once they get to that fourteen hundred and thirty feet depth,
they go into shafts that are another thirty feet deep,
which is four point six times deeper than an Olympic pool,
and then they stack the canisters one on top of
each other. Finally they top off that thirty foot deep
(19:29):
shaft and then they fill them with bentonite, which is
a clever thing to add because it's it's compressed clay
that essentially remember those little dinosaur sponges that were really
tiny and then you drop water on them and they
turn into like a full size Tyrannosaurus rex. It's like that,
but it's the clay version of that. When it makes
contact with water, it expands, and as it expands, it
(19:51):
will form a seal around the canisters. And we just
have to hope that they did the math correctly and
it doesn't pop the cannisters open from the surrounding pressure.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Sure, I did not get the memo that we have
abandoned Big Max in favor of I guess Olympic pools.
What happened pool means nothing to me.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
I just you know, it's just six and a half
feet deep.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Oh okay, So they know it means something to me,
a big mac.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
I know it does, but I don't know. Okay, I'll
bring back the Big Max.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Well we don't. We can't pause for you to do
that mass.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
No, No, I mean in the future. Okay, okay, I'll
bring it back for you here there, all right, Okay.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
It's just a little worried. I thought maybe an email
got by me.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Well, Jerry commanded I leave the Big Max alone. I
think you were so really on that. Yeah, she said,
it's old Josh and tired.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Oh no, yeah, and you how about Olympic pools?
Speaker 2 (20:47):
She said, I don't care as long as it's not
Big Max.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
So that side in Finland can store three thousand canisters,
which is enough to handle Finland. They have five nuclear reactors,
and they said, hey, hey, the whole operational life of
these things, and we'll get to operational life of the
whole reactor site. Because you know, you can't make those
go forever either. You've got to shut those things down eventually.
(21:13):
But Finland can take care of all their business. They
said one hundred and twenty years or so to fill
that thing completely. It'll last one hundred thousand years, and
after one hundred thousand years. The idea is that it's
no longer radioactively dangerous.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Right, which is just wrong. It depends on what source
you go to, and it's not clear like ones from
one side and ones from another side. It really depends
on the source. Some people say nuclear waste is really
just dangerous for the first few decades, right. Other people
say one thousand years. Other people say tens of thousands
of years. Other people point out that an isotope of
(21:50):
uranium I think two thirty six or eight has a
half life of four point five billion years, So it
depends on who you talk to just how long the
stuff is really toxic for. But it seems like the
stuff that the people are most concerned of are things
like iodine one twenty nine, which has a half life
(22:11):
of fifteen million years. It's not good. But then on
the other hand, you have caesium one thirty one. I
think I mentioned earlier that that is really easy to
get into the environment, so it causes a lot of problems.
So does iodine one twenty nine, but it has a
half life of I think like thirty years, so as
long and a lot of the worst stuff actually goes
(22:32):
away while it's in those pools for the first few years.
So it really kind of depends on what element or
isotope you're worried about, whether it's safe after however many
years or not, or if it ever will be safe
under anything but geological deep time. You know.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Yeah, I wonder if they just said, I don't know,
one hundred thousand years sounds like a long time. Just
put that down.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
You know. You get the impression on some of this
that they are saying that because no one will care,
Like you would think that, I mean, this is some
really studied science, so you would think that it would
be like figures bandied about everywhere, like, oh, this is
how long nuclear waste is dangerous for, you know, and
this is why it's just all over the place. And
(23:17):
that actually is a little bit unnerving. So I think,
if anything, you should err on the side of caution,
which is I think what they're doing with the geological
repositories essentially is saying, put it as deep in the
earth as we possibly can, cover it up, walk away,
dusting your hands off, and pretend that it never even happened.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
You know. What I bet they do is they say
how many years in the future. Do you think people
no longer care about their future family line? Yeah, that's
like one hundred thousand years. Yeah, that's great. Put that down.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
I think it was one hundred and they just multiply
it to buy a thousand.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
All right, So we should talk a little bit about
other kinds of nuclear waste. We were talking about the
high level waste again, the most problematic obviously, that is
just three percent, though of total nuclear waste, but contributes
ninety five percent of the total radio activity. More than
ninety percent of nuclear waste is low level, and this
(24:13):
is stuff that you know, it might be like the
protective clothes that you wre on site. It's got a
little radioactive dust on it, maybe some tools, maybe some
disposable materials. We have four locations in the US for
disposing of this low level stuff, one in South Carolina
and one in Washington State, one in Utah, and one
in Texas. And this stuff is not nearly as problematic.
(24:36):
It decays to safe levels in about again, who knows
for sure, but about twenty to thirty years. Well, I
guess in that case they can test it out at
this point. But that's treated almost like a landfill. It's
in case in concrete and covered with backfill.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Yeah, so yeah, we don't really have to worry too
much about low level waste, I think is the upshot
of that, right. Yeah, there's also transuranic waste, which has
incredibly long half lives, and these are often called defense
wastes because they are produced when we produce plutonium for
nuclear weapons. So sometimes plutonium grabs on to some of
(25:15):
the neutrons we've bombarded with and says, oh, let me
form some neptunium, which has a half life of two
point one four million years, or how about some americium
or plutonium two thirty nine itself has a half life
of greater than twenty four thousand years. So this stuff
is really it's really dangerous, But at the same time,
(25:36):
it also is really fissile, meaning it's ready to go.
It's hit me with some more neutrons and let's split
some more atoms so we can release some more energy.
So it's not necessarily a problem if we can figure
out what to do with it. It's just that we
haven't quite figured out how to use it yet, so
in the meantime it gets dropped into the waste isolation
(25:59):
pilot play and for longtime listeners of the podcast, we're
those curious enough to go through the back catalog, which
is really great. We did an episode on nuclear semiotics,
remember that, oh yeah, which is essentially trying to figure
out how to communicate with people ten thousand years in
the future that the waste isolation pilot plant is really
dangerous and to steer clear of it. That was probably
(26:21):
one of my favorite all time episodes.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah, for sure, And you know, I'm glad you mentioned
that real quick, if we could just quickly say we
have many, many, many hundreds up to how many episodes
do we have a couple of thousand.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
If you include the short stuff it's coming up on
like twenty three hundred.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
I think, yeah, a lot of people like the reason
we mentioned this is we get emails every single day
where people like, you should do an episode on like
these five things, and we've done four of the five
of those, and so I think a lot of people
don't realize that. You know, we've been at this for
close to eighteen years, and so we have a vast
repository of things. And if you go to your podcast player,
(27:00):
I know on Apple podcasts, there's a little button you
can click at the bottom that says show all episodes. Yeah,
so go forth and listen. And in fact, we did
have one from twenty fourteen called can nuclear fusion Reactors
Save the World?
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah, so that was a good one too. I love
that one. That's different than this.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Yeah, that's different than this anyway. Lots of good back
catalog episodes, so we encourage you to seek them out.
A little googling can go a long way as well.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Yeah, and our webmaster, Brandon Reid, has put together a
world class search engine on our site, stuffyshould know dot com.
So if you type in any keyword of something you're
looking for, it's probably going to bring up bad episode,
maybe some other episodes that we cover that in, and
then you can listen to it right there on the
site too. So yeah, we do have a very deep
(27:48):
back catalog. It's almost geologic in its stretch.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
How many Olympic pools deep? Is it?
Speaker 2 (27:55):
At least ten to fifteen million? I would say.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Okay, so back to the waste isolated pilot plant in
New Mexico. Here they bury this transuranic Is that how
you said it?
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Okay inside a salt layer. That's a couple of thousand
feet below the surface, and salt doesn't have any maybe
a little bit, but basically no groundwater flow. And you know,
water's your enemy as far as a corrosive agent with
all this stuff. But the salt is going to form
a seal, just sort of like that clay did around
(28:27):
those canisters. And that's what we do with that stuff.
And I mentioned, you know, decommissioning entire nuclear power plants
and reactors. That's something that you have to do because,
like I said, these things, you can't just keep tightening
the bolts on these and expect it to keep running.
I think, in fact, in the United States, sixty years
is like the maximum limit before they say shut this
(28:49):
thing down.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, And strangely I did not realize this, but most
of the contaminated stuff is low level waste, like you know,
hazard suits and stuff like that. And even the concrete
that the whole power plan is made from. I saw
that only about one percent of it is radioactive. The
rest can just be treated as construction waste. Essentially. I
(29:11):
saw a proposal saying like, don't do that, like reuse
this stuff as the concrete, like recycle it as the
concrete that seals in the dry casks and stuff like that.
So there's actually there seems to be much more of
a push to recycle all this stuff, as we'll see.
But there's a whole process to decommissioning, and one of
(29:32):
the parts of this process is making sure all those
fuel assemblies spend or otherwise end up in the cooling
pool and then when it's their time to dry casks.
So what's interesting is a whole power plan will be
taken offline decommission. It's not producing power any longer, but
it still has all those fuel rods, and it's spent
fuel pool, it still has dry casks out back, and
(29:53):
there's still people watching over that stuff because we don't
have anywhere to put it. We're literally leaving them in
spent fuel pools after we turn the power off on
the nuclear power plants. That's what we're doing with our
nuclear waste right now.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Yeah, and there's that water in the pools. Like let's
say you finally get all of them out of the
pool and in dry cask, then you got a big
pool of I imagine, very soothing nuclear water that was
used as a coolant, and you got to do something
with that and what we do with it, And I
guess you know what's basically done with it all over
(30:29):
the world is it's cleaned and then dumped into a waterway,
an ocean or a river or a lake. And most
of these plants are by a body of water for
this reason. And you know, we'll talk a little bit
about how this is done, the two main processes. But
I'm not like a conspiracy guy or hugely cynical, but
(30:50):
I just don't see how that water can ever be
good enough to dump into an ocean or a lake.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
The only thing I've seen is dilution that full first
of all, so they filter out as much of the
radio nuclides as possible, right, Yeah, and there's whole processes
for separating those things out from the water, but there's
still some left. But their premise is that they're adding
so much fresh water to it. Yeah, before they dump
it into the ocean. It's fine. But I think that's
(31:16):
a very valid point. Like we're talking about nuclear science here,
and this is how far behind the environmental part of
nuclear science is lagging that we're just like, it's fine,
forget about it, We're just gonna dump it in the
ocean and yes, it's not so bad that they're not
treating it first and diluting it first, but it's still
(31:39):
it's like, really, that's what we can do. That's the
best we can do right now. And the answer is.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yes, yeah, I mean that's Uh, if I don't mention
the three eyed fish on the Simpsons, we're gonna get emails.
I guess that we have to mention that, right you bet?
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Man.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Did that fish have a named blinky?
Speaker 2 (31:56):
I think, Oh really, I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
Didn't it blink? In sequence? Yeah, like pink pink pink. Yeah,
that's very funny.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
That was a pretty cool fish.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Uh yeah. So that's that's what happens to the water.
So maybe we should take our second break here and
talk about a bit of a brighter future with ideas
for recycling and more. Right after this, goods.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Up with jaw shoe on chow out stuff fish. Okay, check.
So I think I said that there's kind of a
new spirit of recycling that's kind of starting to sweep
the nuclear industry as far as environmental aspects are concerned.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Right, yeah, like you can recycle this stuff.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Yeah, Because there's a couple of things. One is where
when a nuclear fuel rod is spent, it still has
like like a lot of energy left in it. It's
just like you said, not enough energy to power an
old school nuclear reactor. So one solution is to develop
(33:11):
more advanced reactors that can use those same things as fuel.
They're just much more sensitive. Another thing is to take
those and recycle them, like extract the usable stuff out
of it, form new pellets and just start the cycle again.
And you're doing a couple of cool things here. One,
(33:32):
you're taking out the most dangerous part of the radioactive
nuclear waste and leaving behind far less dangerous waste that
you still have to figure out what to do with,
but it's not nearly as bad as the stuff that
you took out of it. And then you're also reusing
power that otherwise under the current plans of just bury
and forget it, you're burying all of that energy. There's
(33:56):
so much energy. There's a startup called oakloh and they
they estimate that the unused spent fuel that we're talking
about just burying thousands of feet under the ground could
power the United States, the entire United States for the
next one hundred and fifty years, just with the spent
nuclear fuel we have right now, and the idea is
(34:19):
to just bury and forget about it. And it's so
stupid that it actually could be considered a lucky break
that Yucca Mountain didn't work out back in twenty ten,
and it's in limbo because it bought time for people
to come up with other ideas rather than just bury
the stuff that's just such a total waste.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Yeah, Oaklo says they can recycle and reuse ninety four
percent of uranium in those spent fuel assemblies, and they're
just one of ten companies. I think they got a
license from the Department of Energy to build a recycling
plant in Oakridge, Tennessee. Shout out to the boys. Sure,
and they're one of ten companies that the Department of
en selected as part of their reactor Pilot program to
(35:04):
build these new reactors that can be powered by recycled uranium.
So that seems like a great way forward. One of
the concerns here is that you know there is a
security risk even though like that stuff is again, like
you said, spent, if you can recycle it to use again,
even in that small quantity of unspentness, you could also
(35:28):
make a dirty bomb. Or something for that, so it
needs to be pretty pretty locked down.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
And the same fear, except even worse, is associated with
extracting plutonium from spent nuclear fuel to use that because
that is the core of a nuclear weapon, and that's
the kind of thing that a foreign country that doesn't
have a nuclear program but really wants one has the
resources to steal from some startup that is refining and
(35:59):
extracting their facility in Tennessee. That's a huge that's actually,
from what I can tell, the number one obstacle to
recycling nuclear waste that security concern.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yeah, I mean they could fix that though.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
I guess. I mean, we keep our nuclear stockpile safe,
or we have for this long, so why can't we
apply some of that same security to these recycling plants.
I don't understand. It just seems like, a yeah, that's
a huge risk, but it's not something we can't figure out,
you know.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
Well, I feel like it probably have to be in
working in concert with the government and not just saying
like all right, Oaklow, you got your security team. I
see those people with the black eyes odds on, It's
all good.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Yeah. So one of the other things we should say,
I think that people are kind of wary about is
that these startups that are talking about new ideas for
nuclear power are typically doing it to get government buy
in to help fund them to build nuclear plants to
power their AI. So these are like like I think
(37:06):
Oaklo is backed by Sam Altman from Open AI. Essentially
humanity would benefit as a side effect from new advanced
designs for producing nuclear power with less waste. That'd be great,
But the intent, the immediate intent by the people who
are doing this is typically to produce cheaper power to
(37:26):
power their increasingly massive artificial intelligences. That's I think makes
some people wary, including me.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Yeah, I mean combining those businesses is a little it's
a little worrisome.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
It is. And I can't let an opportunity pass to
shout out. If anyone builds it, everyone dies. By Eliezer
Yukowski and Nate Sores, it's so good where they just
lay out a very straightforward example of how AI could
just get out of control and how we humans would
be in big trouble. And yet it's it's not like
they're AI haters. They're just basically saying, like, we're going
(38:03):
at this at such a terrible pace so recklessly that
we need to put the brakes on globally and figure
out how to do it safely and then do it
and then humanity can benefit from it. So they're not
like lightites or anything like that, and they know what
they're talking about. It's just a good book.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Yeah, well, you know, with things how things are going
these days, I could use little pick me up, so
maybe a little light reading. Maybe I'll start that again.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
It is like you could read it in a day, man.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
A very depressing day.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
It's good though. It's really interesting too because it's also
a peek inside the current state of the AI industry too,
Like they're insiders, they know what's going on all right.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
So I mentioned earlier these deep geological repositories that they've
almost finished in Finland, Like those aren't the best idea
because who knows what's going to happen long term here
on planet Earth. But they are, you know, extracting the
most highly radioactive parts of this waste from everything else else.
Seems like that's headed toward a pretty a pretty good solution.
(39:06):
So they don't know quite what to do with it afterward.
But one way of doing it is something called transmutation, right.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Yeah, I thought this was kind of genius. So essentially
it's taking the extracted most radioactive parts of nuclear waste
and tossing it into a particle accelerator and bombarding it
with neutrons, and by doing so you actually either you
either change them a neutron knocks them proton or some
(39:34):
something off of one of these off of each of
these atoms and converts it into something far less radioactive
that might decay much more quickly, or they grab onto
a neutron and they transform in that way and become
something that might be much more stable that isn't radioactive
at all. And so you're taking the really radioactive stuff
(39:55):
and you're degrading it really quickly in a particle accelerator,
and if you do it correct Flea, I guess in principle,
I think all of this is theoretical right now, Yeah,
you could actually produce energy while you're doing this, So
while you're getting rid of waste, you could be producing
energy from the bombardment bombardment.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
I love this thought process. Another one that holds a
lot of promise is actually glass and ceramics. Glass and
ceramics can both trap those radio nuclides that you were
talking about, and for like a long period of time,
and you know, the idea is that you store this
stuff in these like like glass logs or ceramic logs. Basically,
(40:38):
glass doesn't degrade very easily, forms a very tight bond
that's kind of like a force field that says nothing's
getting in or getting out. It's a process called vitrification.
But it's not just regular old glass. It's like, you know,
sort of heavy duty nuclear containing glass.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Yeah, and what's cool about it is the glass law
uggs don't act as like container that you put waste in.
You melt the glass, making minerals and the waste together
and it forms the glass log together, so like you're
actually trapping the radioactive particles in glass, not inside glass
as part of glass. It's really genius.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
Yeah, yeah, I thought that was clear. But yeah, it's
thanks for clearing that up.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
You're welcome. And you can also do the same thing
with ceramics too, apparently.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Yeah, ceramics work just as good. We can also re
recycle the fistle material we're trying to you know, the
gold there is to recover uranium and plutonium, the main
materials main fissle materials and again separating out the most
radioactive parts of the waste product. Is what you're doing,
(41:46):
is you're trying just to make it all less bad,
less radioactive for.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
Sure, and then hopefully doing something with it, like turning
it back into pellets like I saw to make a
mixed uranium plutonium oxide MOX fuel, you can use eight
old pellets to create one new one, so it actually
is pretty efficient, and you can keep doing that over
and over again until essentially you just don't have enough
(42:13):
left to actually produce any energy. And one of the
other points that I saw, Chuck, is that even if
we can't figure out how to reuse the fuel that
we've isolated and extracted from the spent nuclear fuel waste,
just being able to do that would reduce it by
so much that it would take a huge amount of
(42:35):
our problem for figuring out what to do with the
waste off of the table. So like, if that stuff
is one percent of all nuclear waste and the United
States has ninety thousand tons of it, that would drop
it down to just nine hundred tons of really problematic
stuff that we had to figure out how to get
rid of ninety thousand so there's I mean, aside from
that security risk thing, there's really no reason not to
(42:58):
process nuclear ways to get the high energy stuff out
of there for one reason or another.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
Yeah, for sure, I think that's it.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Man.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Yeah, go forth and recycle your uranium pellets in your home.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
That's right, Chuck. And since Chuck talked about recycling uranium pellets,
obviously it's time for listener man.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
This is from Kelly Gizmondi. Hey, guys, I'm a lawyer
in Louisiana, started listening to Stuff You Should a few
years ago and currently working my way through the back
log and enjoying every minute. Just got done listening to
your solitary confinement episode and was thrilled to hear you
talk about the Angola Three. I have represented folks from
Angola and one of the most interesting stories from Angola
(43:42):
that was recently published by Calvin Duncan, who was wrongfully convicted.
By the way, It's called The Jailhouse Lawyer, which is
a deep dive into what life is like for inmate counsel.
Inmate counsel or a group of incarcerated folks who learn
and then teach others the law, draft motions and legal
islings for others who are incarcerated and help advocate for
(44:03):
those incarcerated as a whole. This is an essential service
for the incarcerated community because there is no right to
precuncel for post conviction relief, and many people who have
been convicted of crimes cannot afford legal fees for post
conviction relief. Man Essentially, if you are poor and have
been wrongfully convicted of a crime, or if there's another
legal issue with your conviction, often the only way to
(44:25):
get legal help is to work with inmate counsel. They're
incredibly effective and have helped get thousands of incarcerated folks
across Louisiana home to their communities. Would love to hear
an episode on this. Thanks for all you do for
my brain. That is sincerely from Kelly GISMONDI and Kelly,
that may be a good short stuff. There's not a
ton out there, but I bet you we could find
(44:47):
fifteen minutes easy.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
Yeah, let's do it, man, because that is definitely as
far as I'm concerned, and overlooked issue and the justice
system for sure.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Well, God bless you Kelly for what you're doing, your
work helping people who may have gotten screwed over by
the system. And if you want to be like Kelly
and email us to let us know what you're doing
to help your fellow person we want to hear about that.
You can send it to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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