Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel talks to experts about the waste produced by nuclear reactors, the dangers, risks and options.
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When I was young, kids from neighboring towns would sometimes ask me if I glowed in the dark, it was probably because I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, home of the atomic bomb and secret plutonium facilities. Those kids were kind of joking, but also kind of not. They didn't really understand what nuclear meant. What they knew came from movies and The Simpsons, where nuclear waste was a glowing green goo that gave fish a third eyeball. Well, I'm a big fan of the Simpsons, but I'm here to tell you that I don't glow in the dark, and I only have two eyeballs. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I sincerely hope that my research never kills anyone. Both of my parents worked at Los Alamos National Labs, and I never knew the details of their projects, but I knew that they were involved in the weapons programs, so I never visited their offices or even saw the front door of their building because it was all in the part of the lab that required a Q clearance to enter around town that was called working behind the fence. They had their reasons for deciding to contribute to our nuclear arsenal, which are pointed at cities and threatened civilian populations with horrible death. But I decided to work on problems that were more abstract, less likely to put new tools of mass destruction into the hands of politicians. It means that questions that I answer in my research are further removed from humanity. They're less likely to kill anyone, but also less likely to improve your quality of life in the short term by developing new technologies or more powerful toasters. Of course, I think there's inherent value in basic research. You know, knowledge for knowledge's sake. We do fundamental research for the same reason that we build parks. We do it because it's nice, not because we think it's going to lead to a faster graphics processor in quarter two of twenty twenty three. But we also know that fundamental research is the best way to stumble on transformational technologies, just not on the schedule of quarterly profit reports. So welcome to the podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe, in which we dive deep into those fundamental questions about the nature of the universe. What's it made of on the smallest scale, how did it come to be this way? How big is the universe? How small is the smallest thing? We seek to understand the basic nature of the universe so that we can ask even deeper, more philosophical questions like why this way and not some other way? My friend and co host Jorge cham is on a break, so I'm going to do a deep I've into an area of physics that is close to my heart and my background, not because it answers deep questions about the universe, but because it has so much potential to improve or damage the lives of humanity. It's a wonderful example of the power and danger of putting scientific knowledge to work for people. I'm talking about nuclear power and the dangers of nuclear waste. While fission reactors have proven that they can produce a steady supply of electricity using a very efficient fuel and requiring a tiny land footprint, the questions that hang over them are safety and waste. The twenty eighteen UN report about climate change lays out pathways to limiting warming to one and a half degrees, and all of their pathways include nuclear power expansion by one hundred and fifty percent or more. We have recently done a couple of episodes on the safety of nuclear reactors. This episode three sixty six about molten salt reactors whether alternative designs for fission plants that can produce energy more safely than In March twenty twenty two, at episode three seventy six about is nuclear power worth the risks? Where I talk to Kelly about whether we need nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions and whether it can be done safely so that covers the safety of the nuclear reactor itself. Today we're going to talk about the question of the waste produced in the nuclear cycle. Is a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding out there, so I've invited an expert to help us break it down and think it through. So on today's episode, we'll be tackling the question how dangerous is nuclear waste? We sit at a critical moment in our history when climate change is accelerating and we need to make important decisions right now about how to reduce our carbon emissions, but we also need to take care not to spoil our environment. What is the best way forward? Answering that question requires a sober look at the strengths and weaknesses of all the options on the table. Our remind listeners that in our previous episode we explained what makes nuclear power an attractive option. Because while wind and solar are wonderful, they can be transient. Sometimes it's cloudy or the wind doesn't blow in some places in the depths of winter. You need solar power when it's least productive. So it's economical to build a grid that uses solar and wind for maybe eighty percent of our energy. But we need something else, something more robust and steady for the other piece, something to help fill in the gap when the wind doesn't blow and the sun isn't shining. Now, fossil fuels are attractive because they're easy to fire up quickly in response to shortages, but they obviously have huge costs in pollution and carbon emissions. So how well does nuclear power do. It's very steady because it can provide power all day and all night, regardless of the weather, but it's tricky to ramp it up or down quickly. And while it makes no smoke or carbon emissions, it produces a very different kind of potentially dangerous pollution in its radioactive byproducts. Our first guest is Madison Hilly, executive director of the Green New Deal. Maddie, welcome to the program. Thank you very much for joining us today.
Thank you so much. It's great to be here, Daniel.
So first help us understand a little bit about your background and your passion for this issue. Obviously, climate change and decarbonization of our energy is a vital project, but most of us contribute in minor ways. We reduce our use of fossil fuels or energy consumption, or we vote. But you've made it the core of your life's work and career. When did you decide to devote your life to this topic and what made you decide to do that?
Yeah, So I went into nuclear advocacy straight out of college in twenty seventeen after I was presented with the environmental case for nuclear I was really concerned about poverty and developing countries, as well as climate change issues that I thought were at odds with one another. So when I found out that we can lift people out of poverty with cheap, abundant energy while providing unparalleled environmental protection, I was all in. So from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty, I traveled all over Europe and Asia talking to journalists, policymakers, and members of the public about the need for nuclear power. And meanwhile, back at home in the US, we were shutting down perfectly good reactors and we're falling behind the rest of the world on new builds, and I didn't really see anyone articulating a practical vision for transitioning the US nuclear industry from the verge of collapse frankly, to one capable of delivering the economic, environmental and security benefits of nuclear power. So in twenty twenty, I decided to turn my focus to the US and launch the campaign for a green nuclear Deal. So, going into this conversation, I just want to make it clear, I am not a nuclear waste expert. I don't come from an engineering I came out of college with degrees in environmental sciences and political science because I wanted to study and protect the environment. So everything that I've learned about nuclear was to figure out the truth how we can be good stewards of the environment without compromising on human development and prosperity. And I decided to devote my life to being a nuclear advocate because what I learned when I studied was so powerful.
Great, thank you. And there are a lot of interesting issues here, scientific ones, political ones. I thought we'd start with the science and organize our conversation by following the sort of whole cycle of nuclear power, from mining the fuel and dealing with the spent fuel rods and talking about the waste and the risks at each step. So let's start off with just like, what is the fuel that we need for nuclear power? For those who haven't immersed their lives in fission and engineering, what is the fuel that we need? Where we find the fuel for nuclear power?
Sure, so the fuel that we need for nuclear is uranium, and most of that can be an isotope you to thirty eight, and some of that needs to be more fissionable or readily fissionable isotope you too thirty five. So natural uranium that comes out of the ground is in general about zero point seven percent you two thirty five and ninety nine point three percent you two thirty eight. So we are able to extract uranium and then enrich it to be slightly spicier, that's not a scientific way to describe it, but with a higher percentage of you two thirty five to create a reaction to reach criticality within a reactor. And so rather than break up each step of the fuel cycle, I think it's important to start with the context. So, whether it's lignite to fuel coal plants, lithium for batteries, or copper for solar panels, all energy technologies and systems are going to require some amount of extraction. So the question isn't that we're talking about whether we need to mine or not, but how much mining and extraction is actually required for our system. And from an environmentalist perspective, the key is to minimize the mining that has to be done. The great thing about nuclear from this perspective, throughout the whole fuel cycle, from mining to milling and riching and eventually going into the reactor, is that nuclear is extremely energy dense. The technical definition of energy density is just the amount of energy stored in a given system or substance per unit volume, but that translates to smallness, compactness, minimal impact. And another great thing about nuclear is that it's baseload. They don't require battery backup, so anytime you need to dip into batteries or storage, you're suddenly talking about much more mining. So minimizing the amount of storage our energy system will need is the fastest way to reduce lithium mining needs, for example. So wrapping this up, nuclear requires the least amount of mining and extraction across energy technologies. In fact, most of uranium mining globally is done without digging pits or tunnels at all, it's about tiny little wells that have things like straws suck up the uranium.
So you're making uranium sound quite tasty. I mean something you can drink through a straw and even maybe has some spice to it. Joking aside. I understand the point that all technologies require extraction of some resources from the earth, and it's certainly true that uranium is very dense source of fuel, but tell us more about how we get it out of the earth. I know that some uranium is mined via open pit mining. There's also this other technique, leech mining. Is this what you were referring to with the straws right exactly?
So you're basically drilling little wells and using liquids to extract uranium without having to dig open pits. And that's again the beautiful thing about nuclear is that the ways that in which we extract uranium are credibly small and minimizing an environmental impact. One of the silver linings to the stigma around nuclear is that the entire process of extracting uranium and milling it is incredibly regulated, reported with very tight controls and reporting needs. Compared to fossil fuels or other metallurgical mining, despite being very similar, being exactly the same. So the waste from mining uranium is exactly the same, I'm mostly the same as any sort of metals that you're mining from the ground. It's just there's a lot less of it, way way less, and it's more regulated and it's handling because it's part of the nuclear fuel cycle.
And I've heard it said that uranium is also very plentiful in the oceans, that most of the uranium on Earth is actually dissolved into the oceans. Why can't we just filter it out of the water. Why do we need to dig into the ground at all?
So it's, you know, as all things, an issue with costs. So uranium that we can mine is very cost effective, whereas when you're getting into the in situ or pulling out of water, it's not as cheap. So in a future where I think a lot of our energy needs will be met by mining, I do suspect we will be doing more of that. So based on the uranium that we consider economic available and the technology that we're using right now, we are able to meet all of our nuclear needs. But we wouldn't have many years in the bank if we ran completely on nuclear power and everyone had a high standard of living. However, the current reactors that we use barely burn any of the fuel at all, I think just about one percent of all energy available in the fuel rod. So we have these other reactors, fast reactors that can even breed new fuel, which means they can produce about one hundred and forty times as much energy from the same amount of uranium that non breeder reactors can. So that dramatically expands the number of years we can use to power society or we have to power society. We also have thorium, which can only be fully consumed in breeder reactors, which is why we don't really use it. Now, there's a roughly equivalent amount of known thorium reserves as uranium. So again you're doubling that timeframe. Now we're talking about, you know, a thousand years, But what if we want to go longer. This is where your question comes into play. So the earth crust has an average of less than three parts per million of uranium and about six parts per million of thorium. So this is a crazy fact that would mean that a random scoop of dirt has more energy in it than an equivalent scoop of coal. The ocean also has about two to three parts per million of uranium, So, like you said, we can extract that to get to now hundreds of thousands of years of high energy society. Because the ocean will continue to pull uranium and thorium from the soil to maintain that equilibrium, we'll be able to continue that extraction process. So we have at our dispose about four billion year's worth of fissionable resources. It's just what is easily and economically accessible now, given that we don't have this fully nuclear, fully decarbonized system that we imagine we might have in the future. I hope that makes sense.
Yeah, absolutely, And we'll be talking in a few minutes about reprocessing spent nuclear fuel and thorium cycle and all that kind of stuff. But the picture I'm getting is that we have economically cheap waste access uranium, but we also have vast stores of uranium we can access which would be slightly more expensive. But in the mining process, you take it out of the ground, and then you also need to sort of refine it a little bit at this step called milling, where they grind the ore materials to these uniform particle sizes and treat them in some process to produce this powder they call yellow cake. So we have this mining and this milling. What are the byproducts there? I mean, you don't just get pure uranium out. You must produce also other stuff. Is that stuff toxic? Is it like radioactive? Is that something we need to worry So.
Like I said, from the mining perspective, it's no different than the tailings from most mining. So that's not anything special that we need to worry about. For the milling process, you do have some again spicy radioactive material left over for a buy product, but the best thing about it is that it's bagged and tagged. There's almost no radioactivity because that would be a waste of the product. You actually want. The radioactive stuff as a buy product of the milling process, or one of the by products of the milling process. Can sit around until we do have these breeder reactors and again can be eaten up and used as fuel. So I wouldn't even technically classify that as waste because one day, hopefully it will not be waste.
Right, got it in So so that's not just like dumped in piles on the ground you're saying it's being carefully tracked somewhere.
Right again, because of the stigma that the nuclear industry has, it is absolutely necessary that this whole process be under far greater regulation and control. It's not necessary, it's necessary, and that the industry wants to defend itself against anti nuclerism saying that this isn't safe, this is dirty, this isn't reported. So it's created this hyper safety regulation culture that's allowed it to be what it is today. Mills are often owned and run by international partners that have all the pressure from their governments to stay as clean as possible, so it's got the cleanest standards, and mining the cleanest standards, and milling, so that.
Covers mining and milling, and now we have the basic ingredients. Next we'll talk about enrichment. But first, before we get into the spiciest side of nuclear power, we need to take a short break. With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price, your thoughts you were paying magically skyrockets. With Mintmobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan. They really mean it. I've used Mintmobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear. I can recommend it to you. So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So ditch your overpriced wireless with mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintmobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless bill to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile dot com slash universe, forty five dollar upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month new customers on first three month plan only. Speeds slower about forty gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxi speeds and restrictions apply. See mint mobile for details.
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If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield when you open a high yield savings account through Applecard. Apply for Applecard in the wallet app subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Applecard owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC terms and more at applecard dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve net for resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone. Know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more. Okay, we're back and we're talking with Matty Hilly about the dangers of nuclear waste. What is produced, how dangerous is it, what are the options for storing it. So far we've talked about how to get the stuff out of the ground with mining and milling, and next we need to talk about enriched You said earlier that most of the uranium that we take out of the ground is two thirty eight, whereas this also U two thirty five. So for our listeners, those numbers refer to the isotopes of the uranium, essentially how many protons and neutrons are in the nucleus. Sounds very similar, but just three numbers different means very different abilities to fission these materials into something useful. You two thirty five is very fissile, while you two thirty eight needs faster neutrons, So you two thirty five the rarer one is the kind of material that we need, the actual fuel in these reactors. So there's this step where we enrich these things, where we take something which is mostly you two thirty eight and we boost up the U two thirty five fraction of it. How does that typically happen, Matta? Is it mostly through centrifuges?
So quick note some reactors don't currently use enriched fuel. So for example, the can dos in Canada can use natural uranium, so that same ratio of you two thirty five you two thirty eight. But most reactors around the world of the light waters that we're talking about do, and yes, those are enriched with centrifuges. But we might be getting a new technology soon, laser enrichment. I'm definitely not an expert on enrichment, so I can't describe the laser enrichment process. But that might make enriching I think easier and cheaper, is the hope.
And so this leads to some samples of uranium with more U two thirty five and some samples with less. I mean, what you're doing here is you're separating it, right, You're concentrating to you two thirty five. So there must be some waste there, right, some I think they call this depleted uranium.
Yes, so with this depleted uranium, if the market price for uranium goes up, we use more of that depleted uranium. So again, this is not waste in the sense that these are byproducts we can never use. Again, it's that we do not use them now because it's economically cheaper to just not use it. So you can call it extra not.
Waste, all right, that sounds like a very nice word for it. And in terms of volume, there must be sort of a lot of this, right, we need to enrich the uranium from less than one percent to up to a few percent. We must produce a lot of this depleted uranium. Where is that stuff? Is it sitting in warehouses somewhere? Is it being used for something else?
So first of all, you know, when we're talking about a lot that's relative to nuclear, I mean in general, the amounts that we're talking about with uranium and nuclear are just very small because it's very dense. So a lot is actually a very small amount of depleted uranium sitting near the conversion facilities. You know, just in general, from the mind to the reactor, the material flow is very very small, which you know, so when Greenpeace talks about all of the nuclear waste, there's just so lit it that we really have to put it into context. It's important to be reminded that there are very small material volumes.
So more than you could put in your pickup chuck, for example, but much less than is produced by coal or mining for battery parts for example.
Is your point, Oh, absolutely, yeah. So all of the waste from commercial nuclear energy the entire history in the US could fit on a football field stacked about fifty feet high. So each nation only needs a few facilities the size of normal warehouses to store any of this waste or extra that comes from the process of creating nuclear fuel.
So then let's talk about the spicy part. Let's talk about actual power generation. So we have our nuclear plant. We got U two thirty five in there. We have it critically dense so that the neutrons that come off of the fission are slowed down by the water and trigger reactions in other U two thirty five atoms. And for those listeners who want to know more details about the process, check out our previous episodes about nuclear power. We talked about the technology and light water reactors and salt reactors and all that kind of stuff. But the key thing to understand here is that, as you said earlier, most of the fuel that's in the rod is still you two thirty eight, and it's there during the process and it gets split apart and it's transformed by the process, but you still end up with a fuel rod that has a lot of uranium in it. So what exactly is produced when you're done running the fuel you've gotten your energy out, what is it that comes out? What does the fuel rod consist of after the process of extracting the energy?
Right, so you pull out the fuel rod assembly from the reactor, and that's what is what we call the waste. And that waste is made up of three things. One the unused uranium, which is most of it, to the fission products, which are atomic fragments call them lighter than uranium, and transuranics, which are active elements that are heavier than uranium. And all three of these things are stored in the pellets which are stored inside the fuel rods. So that's what's coming out of the reactor.
So heavier than uranium. That's a little surprising. I'm thinking fission, I'm thinking uranium is breaking down. I'm expecting to get stuff that's smaller than uranium. But I know, for example, that plutonium is produced. Is that because it's absorbing neutrons, it's not breaking up. It's just like grabbing some of these neutrons and it's going up the periodic table exactly.
So those transuranics are the result of uranium absorbing neutrons but not fissioning. So you can think of transuranics as future reactor fuel from neutrons going into uranium and making them chonking it up to speak. On the other hand, you have these fission products, which are small and the result of as you were describing the fissioning, they're the fragments left over at the end of that products.
Great, so we have these three elements you're saying. We have the leftover uranium, we have the transuranics like plutonium, and then we have the byproducts. And so here we have things that are like neptunium two thirty seven with a two million year half life and uranium two thirty four with one hundreds of year lifetime. I think this is the kind of stuff people think about when they hear nuclear waste. They hear about things that are radioactive and that will last for millions of years, So tell us about the dangers of these like how dangerous are these things? Why are we worried about them?
So the general rule of thumb for radiation is that a short half life means higher radioactivity, so much spicier, but for a shorter period of time. Long half life means lower radioactivity. It's less spicy, but over a much longer time. So very short half life products are of little concern when we talk about the waste because by definition, they've already lost most of their radioactivity by the time the fuel rods have cooled off. So all of waste management is really dealing with these longer lasting products. And so trans uranics do have a long effective half life, but that also means they don't produce nearly the heat or penetrating radiation of those short half like products or fission products, and so they might last for a long time, but they're not nearly as hazardous as some of the other materials that we're concerned about. And because these trans uranics can be consumed in fast reactors, that would mean their remaining waste is very short lived compared to the traditional spent fuel that we currently have.
All Right, so you're telling us that the stuff that doesn't last very long, like the seasium one thirty seven and the strontium ninety, these have half lives of like decades. These things are very toxic because they don't last very long. They're like giving up the ghost all in one go, spring out all of their toxicity in the moment. Whereas the other stuff, the stuff that people think about lasting a very long time, isn't as dangerous because it lasts a long time because it sort of spreads out the poison or millions of years rather than decades exactly.
And most of those transuranics actually have radioactivity less than the equivalent of their uranium or equivalent to one ton of fuel, so it would be like grabbing dirt essentially.
So let's talk about what we can do with this stuff. Obviously, the very short lived products, the very toxic ones, this just needs to be stored and you just need to be shielded from it until the radioactivity dies away. Those have half lives of like decades. But this other stuff, plutonium two thirty eight, plutonium two thirty nine is very long lived. You're saying that we can reuse this. It's a little surprising and counterintuitive to think, like the waste that comes out is also fuel, because why wasn't it just fuel the first time around? What do you need to do to it to make it like usable again? Why wasn't it just useful in the first go around?
Right? So, this in part gets into the different of reactors that we have and reactors that we will use in the future. So in thermal nuclear power plants, we're talking about slow neutrons. These are neutrons that basically move at the same speed of the materials in the reactor, so slow relatively speaking, as opposed to fast reactors, where fast neutrons smash up everything in there but are less efficient doing so. So you need a lot of neutrons and you need to move fast because some leak.
Right.
So my understanding is that the slow reactors area of you two thirty five, and they produce neutrons that are a little bit faster than they actually need to take in order to do more fission. Right, So YouTube or I five produces neutrons and if those hit other items would cause fission, but actually works better if they're a little bit slower. This whole nuclear model, where you have protons and neutrons layered together in these shells, the speed at which the neutron hits it really affects whether it's going to split in half or get absorbed. So in the original process the thermal water reactors, you've got to slow down those neutrons to be like the optimal speed for you two thirty five. If you're saying these other fuels, they actually like faster neutrons. So now you need like a different kind of reactor, one where you have the fast neutrons buzzing about to create fission in these other products. So the two steps require different speeds of neutrons, which is why it doesn't just happen all at once.
Right. So if you're working with slow neutrons, which we do in our current thermal reactors, you form but do not fission the transuranics. So what you would need to do is take them out and switch them to a fast reactor. But you can also just start with a fast reactor. In fact, the first ever light bulb to get powered by a generator from a nuclear reactor was a fast reactor.
And so historically did we start out with just the sort of slow neutron reactors and not worry about this stuff because it was cheaper to be inefficient about it, to sort of use up some of the U two thirty five and leave the rest of the stuff as waste. And now we're developing these faster reactors or what's the history of it there, if you know.
So, we did try a lot of what are now being touted as advanced nuclear designs back in the fifties and sixties with the commercial nuclear Energy program. Part of the reason we chose light water is that for these fast reactors, you need spicy or fuel. You need that higher enrichment, the higher ratio of YouTube thirty five to YouTube thirty eight to start up that fast reactor. And so the thought was that's you know, more difficult, has higher proliferation risks, was the main motivation to avoid that and stick with the lower enrichment. And light water really helps to slow down neutrons a lot while carrying away lots of heat, which is how you get energy from a reactor. So I think there's this narrative that, oh, we just chose this very inefficient technology because we adopted it from the Navy and we got locked in, whereas there are these other better alternative designs where there were actually a lot of physical and engineering and like sound reasons why the light water reactor was a really great reactor to commercialize and export to the rest of the world.
All right, So now we have this technology, we produce waste, and part of that we can reprocess into fuel for other reactors, extract even more energy out of it. As you were saying, this gives us a huge extension on our ability to like power our society using uranium. But still we're going to have some waste right in the end. We can't burn everything up into harmless byproducts. Even if you do these fast reactors, you get something. So tell us about what it is that actually comes out. I mean, I think in people's minds you have these Homer Simpson barrels of glowing green goo. What does the nuclear waste actually look like?
Right, So for most of the world, it looks like this. They are long, skinny metallic rods that are all put together in a bundle called a fuel assembly, and once they're done cooking in their reactor, you take them out. They're put into what's called a spent fuel pool to cool off and then afterwards, you know, maybe like five years or so, they're taken out and put into these virtually indestructible, large steel and concrete containers called casks.
Can I stop you there and ask you about that? You said that they cool off for five years in a pool. Are we talking about heat in terms of like radioactive spiciness or heat in terms of temperature? What takes five years to cool down?
Both? So, like I said, there are the short lives lived spicier products that we want to lose their radioactivity, but there's also the thermal energy from radiation. So the answer is both.
So these things are literally hot and they take five years to get colder. Is that because of the radioactive processes that are still happening, like the caesium and the strontium that's decaying, it's still heating up the rod as it's cooling.
Yeah, the spiciest stuff is decaying rapidly and that's putting off thermal energy.
And can we capture any of that energy? It seems like you have these glowing rods that are dumping heat. Can we just use water and capture that heat and turn that into energy or is that just wasted somehow.
I mean, some people have proposed this. I don't actually know what the feasibility is. I don't know that it's that important in the grand scheme of things, but perhaps all right.
And so now we have these rods which contain things we don't think are useful in the fuel cycle anymore, and spent five years cooling down and bleeding off some of the radioactivity. And then the question is what do we do with it? Right, we need someplace to put it that's like geologically stable and that we don't think future humans are going to stick a straw into it and drink it. So what are the options in terms of like where to put this stuff?
Right? So first let's talk about what we do in the United States. Like I said, you get these assemblies out of the spent fuel, and you put them into these big containers, and right now they just sit right at the site of production at the power plant. They have a perfect safety record, they're regulated, monitored, and you can hug them, you can sit on them. I mean the utilities typically don't allow people to come in and do that, but the times that nuclear advocates have been allowed, you can touch them. I mean they're completely and perfectly safe. There are videos of these casts getting hit by a train and the train does not survive the impact, but the cast does. There's also they shot a missile at these casks and it was unharmed. I mean, it was damaged, but nothing that would open the cast that compromises the integrity of the cask. So the way we do it currently is just fine.
So can I stop you there and ask you a question? Because the perception among those who are not experts and haven't done the research in this is that nuclear waste is dangerous and that it's been spilled and that we don't have a way to contain it. And you're telling us something quite different. You're saying, basically that we have the technology to seal it up in a way that we never have to worry about it again. I read a report from Greenpeace. Here's a quotation from their executive summary. They said, without exception, all countries reviewed were found lacking a sustainable and safe solution from managing the vast volumes of nuclear waste. This includes high level spent fuel produced in all nuclear reactors, for which to date, all efforts to find secure and safe permanent disposal options have failed. How do you reconcile their statement with what you telling us about the safety of nuclear waste. Are they talking about different things or is it just a different policy approach?
Right, So there are two things that you address there. I want to start with the first, which is the public perception, and I think that's a very real issue. In fact, I think that is the most important issue facing nuclear waste. It's not that there's any danger. There isn't because the hazards of the waste are physically very small and very weak to the countermeasures and systems we already have in place. The public doesn't know because they haven't been able to visit. So their perception of nuclear waste comes from mister Burns shoving green barrels of goo into trees in the Simpsons, and not just these big, ugly, boring concrete casks that take up the space of, you know, a fraction of a parking lot. So I think that there needs to be more transparency when it comes to nuclear way to solve that perception issue. Green Piece is a different thing. So green Piece is an anti nuclear organization, which means they aren't looking for a solution, they're looking for nuclear not to exist. Their trick is to be for everything that doesn't exist yet, like geological repositories being proposed or very advanced nuclear reactors, but then turning against them as soon as they even begin to exist. So, for example, Finland actually does have a geological repository and Green Piece has fought it every step along the way, and now that it exists, says it's not good enough. So they start by defining everything in nuclear as not sustainable. Then they point out everything existing and proposed and called it unsustainable if it includes anything with nuclear. That's the game I see.
And something else that might give people the sense that nuclear power produces waste which leaks out into their water table, for example, is that there have been nuclear incidents at reactors Fukushima and Schernobyl, and these things have caused radioactive clouds, for example, or into the water, and that is something that people need to think about when it comes to nuclear power. But today we're just talking about the danger of the waste itself, right, the actual product that comes out of a nuclear power plant which is operating in a stable and safe manner, right, right.
So you can't really understand the fear around nuclear waste if you just look at the science and the physical evidence and what's coming out of the reactor. So I think a better way to understand is when you start looking at it in terms of a way to express nuclear fear by projecting it onto the waste and a lot of minds there's no difference between nuclear power and nuclear bombs, and these tasks of nuclear waste are seen as small nuclear bombs, which is a huge public perception problem. So again, I think if people were allowed to visit the waste like they are in other countries and see it for what it is, suddenly you can have a conversation about what do we do with a waste that deals with the physical nature of the waste and not the emotional concerns around it.
All right, great, thank you. I want to talk more about the storage issues and Yucker Mountain and how we move forward, but first let's take another quick break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite, But the people in the dairy industry are us. Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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Okay, we're back and we're talking with Maddy Hilly about what to do with nuclear waste, and we're talking about the stuff that comes out of the reaction. Once you've processed it, you've gotten your fuel, maybe you've done some reprocessing to use more of the radioactive elements inside the rods, and now you need a place to safely keep this. And you're telling us that it's basically not a big deal. You can just wrap it up in these casks and you can even store it above.
Ground, right exactly.
So in the United States, for many years, there was this project at Yucca Mountain to basically bury this stuff, to find a place to put it where we thought it was not going to be geologically a problem for many, many thousands of years, and where maybe future humans weren't likely to stumble across it. What is the history of Yucka Mountain? Why did that fail? And do you think we need a similar kind of project or a totally different approach.
So I think Yuka Mountain is another example of the nuclear industry trying to respond to social concerns with costly technological solutions. So Yucca Mountain, the idea is that you would put your waste in the center of the desert, deep underground, so it could harm no one and no one would be near it. But we already have a system that has a perfect safety record. So Yucca Mountain, if it were to get completed, would save zero lives, protect against zero injuries, avoid zero cancer. But what it would do is give the false impression that nuclear waste is somehow uniquely dangerous industrial waste, such that it needs to be in the middle of nowhere, deep underground. Ironically, because of the sheer cost and effort involved in a repository like Yucca Mountain, the public fears that about nuclear waste are reaffirmed, not diffuse. So they see that the industry and government are willing to spend all this money and build a huge megaproject to bury the waste, and they think, wow, my god, that must be so dangerous. Let's just not have it at all.
So you're saying it's sort of performative. It's not actually making things safer. It's just sort of trying to make people feel like something is being done.
Exactly. It's trying to solve a social concern with a technological fix, which is kind of the main theme of the nuclear industry over its existence, at least in the US.
And let me ask you another question about your claim. Earlier you said that this has a perfect safety record, and I wonder if that sort of jibs with people's perception of the nuclear industry, because you know, we hear about toxic spills. I was reading a report from the Department of Energy that says that there are millions of gallons of radioactive waste, and they are huge quantities of contaminated soil and water, and they identify like fifty seven sites that need clean up. Is that because this radioactive waste comes from other sources, other processes, other industries, and that the spent nuclear fuel itself has never had a safety issue. Is that the distinction?
Yes, exactly. So almost all of those things that you mentioned, including Hanford, including you know, the southwest US, are almost exclusively heritage weapon facilities. So I would say, if anything, the creation of a commercial nuclear energy industry has made nuclear at large safer because now we know how to properly regulate and monitor waste. So those are all from the weapons project, which is a separate topic and one that I think is really important to cover. But none of that is from commercial energy production.
Great, and so you were telling us that yucka Mountain wasn't actually a great idea because it was mostly performative, it was very expensive, and plus then you had to transport this waste from where it is produced and where it could be safely stored into some other location, carrying these things like across the country. So what do you think think is the best path forward for storing nuclear waste? Should we just sort of keep it where it's produced.
To start off? I would just want to say that I have absolute confidence that underground storage will work physically. That's not the problem here. The problem is that the impulse misunderstands the needs and fears. So for example, I mentioned earlier that the Finish have built an underground repository. But the Finish are already extremely pro nuclear. Their Green party has rebelled against the green Peace party line and openly supports nuclear power, so they had the comfortability with nuclear first and the repository came next. In the US, we don't have that comfortability, and part of that is I think the lack of transparency and honesty and the discussion about waste. So in my opinion, nuclear waste is like co parenting. You want absolute transparency and visitation rights. What does that mean. We need to talk about the waste and put the risk into context, which is that there's virtually no risk and that our system works great. And then we need the public to be able to visit and see that for themselves. They'll come and see that this isn't green barrels of leaky goop. You know. For example, in the Netherlands, they store their process waste in a centralized facility that's basically an education and art museum open to the public. They can walk on top of the waste with just some concrete in between them and the spicier stuff. And that's the really spicy stuff compared to what we have because it's processed. So I think that in the US our first priority is to allow the public to see that nuclear waste is no big deal. Then we can have discussions about waste that deal with the physical properties of the waste and not how do we ease social and emotional concerns?
All right, Well, it's a very complex issue scientifically, and the politics are even more complicated. So thanks very much Maddy for coming on today and walking us through some of the details of what exactly is nuclear, ways to how to store it, and what the real dangers are. Really appreciate your time. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Daniel, great to chat.
So that was my conversation with Matty Hilly, who is a very strong advocate for commercial nuclear power and feels that the waste is something that we can manage. I thought that it was important, however, to hear from folks on the other side of the issue, so I reached out to representatives from Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Counsel. Here are some excerpts from my interviews with them. Okay, and so I'm very pleased to welcome Jan Havercamp. He's a senior expert in nuclear energy and energy Greenpeace, and he has a master's degree in environmental science. Jean, thanks very much for taking some time to talk to us.
Well, I'm very happy to be there. It's an afternoon here, beautiful weather and for you, very early morning.
So my first question for you is what is your assessment of the safety record of various producers of sort of the most dangerous highest level waste. We heard from an advocate for a nuclear power who told us that the commercial nuclear power industry has a quote perfect safety record when it comes to spent fuel. Is that how you would characterize it?
Well, exactly, yeah.
I mean we've had a lot of incidents in the princess in the reprocessing industry which is dealing with spent fuel. One of the most horrible ones is probably the Tope Mura incident, where too much of high level material was thrown together and where we had an explosion. I mean, most instance you don't want to see often. But we also have the track record of La Hag in France, and track record for cellar Field, and the track record of Mayaki in Russia.
There is a lots to tell about that.
There is so much to tell about that that I want to go now into all of them. But the management of spen nuclear fuel is not an easy.
Job to do.
It's technically very complex, and in technical very complex thing, things go sometimes wrong. Luckily enough, most of the time those are minor incidents where we deal with a minor contamination of people that are involved. But we have seen some very very large incidents like the Maiac nineteen fifty seven incident or teach Team incident as it's also known which is probably the third largest emission or radioactive substances from the industry. Of course, you can argue whether the Russian lucre industry is a civil looker industry because it's a hybrid industry, a military civil, but that's a discussion you can have. It's high level radioactive BSEd is a very complex issue, and I think slogans are not really benefit to the discussion.
About to help us understand the challenge here, why not just store the fairly small volume of nuclear fuel at the reactors where it's produced so you don't have to transport it, you don't worry about loss and damage during transport. Why don't you store them at the reactors or at facilities like Cobra in the Netherlands. What's the danger there?
The small amount is at the moment almost half millions of four hundred eight and ninety thousand tons worldwide, so it's not that smaller than a mat.
Here in Evans we have one hundred and.
Ten cubic meters, which is not that very much at Cova, and I think storage of spendlooker fuel temporarily is basically the default option that the majority of the operators is now choosing, and that's done in different qualities.
One of my headaches last night was.
Shelling self revision power station and a shell that was falling next to the dry casket storage there.
You'll hear my sigh.
I mean that has been a few hours of sweating to five find out what the impact was. It was just far enough away, So I'm happy about that. There is no incident there. In the Netherlands, for instance, that Covira, how we've chosen for.
A very large and very well.
Protected engineered storage based to Habog, and I think that that is probably at the moment the state of the art of how to temporarily store high level radioactive waste. Now that's not spent fuel the Netherlands are reprocessing, so that's sitrified waste, which we are sure that it will have to be kept out of the environment for the next few hundred thousand years. Temporary storage for that reason is only a temporary solution in this case until their year and thirty, when it is supposed to close a decision about what to do with the waste. Then is in the Netherlands not going to be taken before the year twenty one hundred. That is probably also your great great grandchildren that will have to take that decision for something where they have had no benefit of at all.
Or I notice there's a few things that play here.
In principle, if we have waste like this, it is better to store it with as little transport as possible dry storage on site, but you need to take care that also, and all we protect against extreme circumstances as we now see in saputy difference.
Is that why you describe it as temporary storage because you don't think this is sustainable for five hundred thousand or a million years.
This is designed for both one hundred years and you need to do something with it.
Then the choice of options is at this moment not very large.
So the most of the people working in the sector talking now about the geological disposal as the preferred option. My remark is then I'll always if it works. The other options that we see now are a fully engineered solution for the long term, but that is not what is cover. Cover is an engineered solution for one hundred years.
Just to clarify, I can ask you why does storage at the reactor or in cobra only work for one hundred years? What happens after one hundred years that it's no longer possible to leave these things where they are now.
Well, the concrete that we have there of the building is not for eternity. It's being designed to withstand, for instance, severe weather impacts tornados for a period of about one hundred years a well beyond at the moment that we talk about long term storage of this way, so we talk about hundreds of thousands of years, there's something you can just uphold. You would have to have people take over the responsibility time by time to upgrade the installation, to repair the installation so that it is still able to withstand natural impacts or malevolent impacts, and that is a very long responsibility. You could theoretically, of course, think about engineering something that will not need that, but that is something in which is not very much researched on at this very moment. So engineers fully engineered solutions are not really taking in a serious option right now within the industry. And the last option that I'm now only seeing is extremely debarholes.
Then we talk about three four five thousand meters deep.
There is research ongoing at this moment into that option, but it's still in its infancy and for that reason, Yeah, what is happening in Covin is really is temporary storage. And what is happening in most other cases like Fielsburg in Germany or we see also in Zaporagia, I mean Ukraine, or what we see in the general bill suspend fuel site that was set up there by Holtech. That is all temporary storage places there design distemporary storage places.
So something that pro nuclear advocates of in comment is that the waste that's produced by nuclear power is toxic, but temporarily, that these things will decay, that in five hundred thousand years or a million years, it will no longer be toxic, whereas the mercury and lead and cadmium produced in other industries is toxic forever. What's your response to that kind of argument.
I worked on mercury who waste in the Czech Republic when I was living there with my toxic campaigner dreams tech Republic. That's also a headache. I mean, if one headache is a headache, it doesn't mean that something else is not a headache. I find it a very shabby argument in the discussion. That is, yes, that is not eternal, it's a risk that endures for the peak is in a few thousand years. In about twenty four thousand years, it's not such an issue anymore. But I hesitate taking people seriously who think that that is not such a problem. In human terms. Geology is an interesting science, but it has very little relevance for a human lifetime. Well, it has a lot of the elevens for human lifetime, but not when we talk about times.
And even if we talk about low and mid level waste, I.
Mean, we've got in categories that need to be kept out of the environment for about one hundred years, three hundred years, seven hundred years depends a little bit on the eyes.
Of hope even there.
Two three generations is a very long time, and to getuarantee political stability for those times, guarantee that you can keep it safe is a piece of homework that we of course they're not only face for radioactive waste, also for other toxic waste, but it's a piece of homework of our generation that is going farther than we currently are able to manage properly, say the least. So for that reason, I mean, I've my grandchildren are the loveliest of kids, but their generation is going to have to clean.
Up a lot of rubbish that we've been making.
So here in the United States, we've seen some nuclear power plants close without replacements by new facilities, for example Indian Point in New York, and a lot of the power that was produced by that plant is now being produced by natural gas, which emits, of course, lots of carbon. What's your advice for policymakers who want to decarbonize the grid and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and need something to bridge the gap between what solar and wind can provide and what the grid needs. What's your advice for how to close that gap?
The first advice would have been start earlier with renewables.
I mean, we've been calculating for greenpeace since two thousand and three of us. The first version the so called energy revolution scenarios for the r is between records, and that's because we have been only calculating technical evolutions conservatively. But we are well aware that thinking that way needs a political revolution.
Now.
If we look at the scenarios that have been developed over the time until twenty fifteen when we stopped producing them, and we look at more recent scenarios, the goals that we need to set to keep within the Paris Agreement one and a half degree, meaning that we need to speed up development of truly clean renewable sources very fast anywhere. There's just no getting around that. And that's point one what needs to be done. And if I look at seas of different countries, and I look at the policies of countries that have a higher amount of nuclear in their mixes, I see that the developments towards eight hundred percent renewable grid is low down there. I mean, an example is Finland where the development of solar, but especially wind, where the heavy, huge potential has been slowed down enormously by the fact that they were focusing on the finalization of Holtulo unter three. Now that took twelve thirteen years longer than they expected. That means also that the development of renewables they are sold for about thirteen years.
But are you suggesting that we can use pure renewables, just solar and wind as a way to provide energy for the grid.
Renewables is why the ninja solar and wight. I mean, but I think we can come to a zero fully renewable energy provision in twenty fifteen. That is still possible. It needs a lot of a lot of work with that's possible. Now you said, well, before we're getting there be a gap. That depends on the great structure you have. It depends on where you are. We've seen similar discussions in Germany where the closed capacity of nuclear has been surpassed with produced capacity by largely wind and solar, but also a good fraction of biogas, and that appeared to be possible. It appeared to be possible to phase out sensibly and face in renewables in a sensible way. What went wrong there is that there has been a large hesitance to close down call. And we see now that Germany has to speed up. Even it's already relatively well, it has slowed down. To be very honest, that it's relatively high development of hugle energy sources because it has slowed down.
They can do it.
And that is also the steps that we see now in the Ukraine War and the gas problems that that Germany is facing. We see there especially an increase in development of their renewable resources, and that's possible for the United States. The choice for fracking gas was I think a politically very conscious one. I don't think at the moment it was the most wise choice when it happened. And the fact that we now see gas increasing, gas use increasing in the United States when unker power station switches off here and there, as you mentioned, has more to do with past policies than that it has to do with the decision to replace them CREP by gas. And I think that it makes sense to look at the issue from a total grid perspective and prepare also for the coming years of an increase in in renewable production, a grid that can deal with it storage that comes with it, with more dispatchable sources like biogas, there will be a tiny niche for hydrogen in it. There will be a good niche for in it, I suppose for battery storage that needs attention at this very moment.
Thanks very much, that's very helpful. Appreciate your time and your thoughts on the issues.
You're welcome so you can.
Hear that Yan has a very different view about the long term dangers of spent nuclear fuel than Maddy did, and specifically whether storage at the plant where the waste is created is a temporary solution on the timescale of hundreds of years, or a long term solution on the timescale of thousands of years. Dealing with storage over thousands or millions of years is very tricky, not just scientifically but politically. Where does it go? Who would accept it? And why? What promises could we make to them. I spoke to Jeffrey Fetis at the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, a senior attorney for nuclear, climate and clean energy and the former Assistant Attorney General of New Mexico, and I asked him about the prospects for finding a place to keep this stuff. Here's what he had to say.
That is a terrific question.
And I love the way you asked it, because I think you're asking the right way as you're starting at what are the prospects for it?
And how do we get there?
And I want to give a little piece of history to your listeners that I hope will be really helpful in centering them on where the agreements are and where the disagreements are. And I'll start with Yuka, because everybody turns to Yucca Mountain and says, oh, it was a disaster, or it was all politics, or the science was bad, or all of the fights over it, and NRDC has a different view than reductive or easily breaking it down into it was one thing that killed Yuka, and for too long, too many industry advocates conflated support for the yucka mountain repository is support for any deep geological repository.
That's just wrong.
I'll do a fast history and then I hope to get you to a narrative that really centers you want and your listeners to. These are where the agreements are, and here are the challenges. So in nineteen fifty seven, the National Academy of Sciences came to a conclusion that spent nuclear fuel and high level waste, and we had both of it by nineteen fifty seven, not much of the spent nuclear fuel yet, but we certainly had high level waste at Hanford and Savannah River. They came to conclusion, we have to get this stuff into a deep geologic repositor or repository plural, and that's kind of been the consensus ever since, and it remains the consensus to this day. That we can't shoot it into the sun, we can't send.
It under the sea.
The sort of holy grail for nuclear true believers was eventually we're going to have hundreds and hundreds of fast reactors that we can reprocess the waste.
And that hasn't worked out.
And NRDC ses no suggestion that it ever will work out. But in nineteen eighty seven, Congress short circuited the process of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and said, well, this looks really expensive and problematic. So Nevada gets the short straw and it's all going to go to Yukamount.
And then we spent about.
Twenty years in a ferocious fight with Nevada and many others objecting to how YUCKA was decided upon and what its technical qualities were.
There was a.
One of those classically boring DC August commissions created called the Blue Ribbon Commission for America's Nuclear Future, that ran from twenty ten to twenty twelve, and it came out with three really important, again consensus bipartisan observations.
That remain true then and remain.
True now and hopefully can guide the way forward. But they've still left one thing off the table.
Ready.
This is what they found. They said, we've got to have a repository way for repositories. We've just got to have a repositor. There's no other way to do this, to store this waste and then eventually dispose of it permanently in a way that's morally and technically suitable. Number Two, reprocessing isn't going to solve things in any time in our life time, not for years. And number three, we've got to get consent based siting. We've got to get the consent of the folks of where the waste is eventually going to go places plural, we think, but we've got to find a way to get consent.
And in already agrees with that.
And what the Blue Riven Commission didn't do was talk about how to get consent. They didn't describe how do we arrive at consent and what does it look like? And so if you look at where we are now, this is why your question was so thoughtful because you asked it in the right way, which was what's the prognosis, like, what's the chance where are we? Well right now, we still can't get consent. NOV is never going to give consent.
There's been no.
Indication over forty years the state will give consent, and nor should they as far as innertyc is concerned. They were chosen based on political weakness, not on the technical merits of the site.
Those bedrock environmental laws.
Don't apply to the clear based No state will ever be okay with that, and this has been bipartisan. Right now, the two efforts to cite consolidated interim storage sites are in New Mexico and Texas. Both governors, as different as they could be, Governor Abbot in Texas and Governor Luhan Grisham in New Mexico have expressed ferocious non consent. We're going to keep ending up in this cul de sac until we deal with consent and really figure out how it works. We think Congress should pass a law removing the exemption from nuclear waste from vedrock environmental laws. Right now, the actual organic law that governs the nuclear industry exempts them from environmental laws. And we think once that exemption's gone, EPA could set nationwide safety radioactive protection standards and EPA and the state's considability on their own limits on how much and on what terms the waste would come, and then we can move much faster than what we've ever done on nuclear waste on siting because the power dynamics will be so different there's my explanation of nuclear waste on how we can go forward.
Wonderful. Thank you. So your focus then is on establishing consent and setting up the situation so that things can be monitored and regulated. So is it your opinion then that the technical solution exists that we can put this stuff underground fairly safely, where it can sit for thousands or millions of years and mostly not harm the people living above the surface. That it's essentially mostly a political and policy issue right now.
That's a terrific question.
I think it should remain absolutely foremost in everybody's mind that this is a profound technical challenge like few others. I mean, you're a scientist and you're asking an extraordinarily difficult thing of everybody, from engineers to archaeologists and anthropologists, to suggest that something can be safe or something beyond the scale of human history. It's a profound technical challenge by any measure. And do I think it's simple. Do I think that the scientific defensibility of any particular site is going to be a straightforward process.
No, I don't. One of the things that's.
Been most interesting as a lawyer to work on these issues is I get so much history from so many brilliant people, from geologists to physicists to engineers, two archaeologists, anthropologists who looked at so many of these sites, from Lyons to Tennessee, the Salmon Site in Mississippi to Yucca, and what I understand, Yucca looked as a site much more promising in the nineteen eighties than it did by the middle of the nineties. The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. By the early two thousands, they suggested that the technical case for Yucca was weak to moderate at best, and that was a site that had.
Been studied for twenty years.
So I think the technical issues or any of this going forward are going to outstrip most other decisions we make as a society. They're just that difficult because it is it's a million year challenge. It's a challenge beyond the scale of human history. But I think the thing that is so apparent to us after sixty years of failure to get to even interim storage sites that are not just at the point of generation. We have interim storage sites, by the way, that are technically working, which is at reactor sites. They are still there. We haven't had a dreadful accident yet in this country, and that's good, and let's hope we can keep the NRC on its job to ensure we think, by the way, the NRC should do better and require the fuel get moved from densely packed pools into dry storage faster.
That's a safety issue, all right.
Thank you very much to all of our guests and interviewees for sharing their thoughts, and to listeners for hanging on for this extra long episode. I hope that gave you a taste for the technical side of nuclear waste, what it is, how it's made, how dangerous it is, as well as a flavor of the political complexities of solving the problem of long term storage. All of this goes to inform policymakers who have to make the really tough decisions in a changing landscape and a very hard to predict future. Thanks very much for listening and tune in now next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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