What To Do With All This Nuclear Waste?

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. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:40Speaker 03

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:49Josh Clark?

  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.

• 2:05Josh Clark?

  Are you talking about the green goo?

• 2:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's just hard not to think of Homer Simpson when you're talking about nuclear power at all.

• 2:12Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and nuclear waste in particular, right?

• 2:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, you know, that little rod flies right into his hood.

• 2:19Josh Clark?

  Right, this inanimate carbon rod is the employee of the year, I think.

• 2:24Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 2:25Josh Clark?

  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 Mili Oestvez and Charlie Sheen.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  Never saw it.

• 2:45Josh Clark?

  It's good. As far as 80s comedies go, it's pretty good.

• 2:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, alright.

• 2:50Josh Clark?

  And they play a lot of two live crew, too.

• 2:52Speaker 04

  Oh, wow, there you go.

• 2:54Josh Clark?

  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 sludge, toxic nuclear sludge that is described as having kind of a peanut buttery consistency, which is gross and dangerous, you know?

• 3:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not a sandwich you want, unless you cut the crust off.

• 3:17Josh Clark?

  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 fuel, is 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's brought in.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  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 of it, of course, but this is stuff that's super dangerous.

• 4:06Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  And these pellets are these little cylinders about the size, I guess it depends on your thumb, but, you know, like midway up your thumb, half a thumb.

• 4:19Josh Clark?

  Okay, half thumb, anything but metric.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, not the thumb stump. Like the actual thumbprint section of your thumb.

• 4:28Josh Clark?

  The thumb sprout.

• 4:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, the thumb sprout, exactly.

• 4:32Speaker 04

  And, you know, disposing of this stuff is sort of the highest level of concern because we have to do it safely. We don't, there's not a place in the world that has a permanent solution for this. 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 50,000 years.

• 5:00Speaker 04

  And we were gonna build one of these in 2010 and we'll talk about why that didn't happen. But since the 1940s, 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.

• 5:20Josh Clark?

  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 think something like if you took all of the nuclear power that you used, you Chuck, used for your entire lifetime, the moment of birth.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 5:52Josh Clark?

  The moment you die.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  In a couple of years.

• 5:55Josh Clark?

  All of, no, far longer than that.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  I hope so.

• 5:59Josh Clark?

  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's 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.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  That's right. And by the way, if people think I do have Chuck Stradamus powers of the future, please do not get concerned that I foretold my death in two years. It's okay.

• 6:25Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 6:26Speaker 04

  I'm doing great.

• 6:27Josh Clark?

  I don't know if that erased it for everybody, but all right. It was a good attempt.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  I could just see, hear someone out there being like, oh, no, no, Chuck said he's gonna die in two years. He shan't even say things like that, lest we forget Jared and Hugh Jackman.

• 6:38Josh Clark?

  I mean, I don't like you saying it, but you know, I'm just, I'm nervously laughing instead.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  All right. So we should kind of quickly go over how nuclear reactors work, even though we have a pretty great episode on that.

• 6:51Josh Clark?

  But the, the upshot of all this is even though each of us just has a hockey puck's worth of nuclear waste, and it amounts to, I think, like 90,000 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 in very, very special places. And those special places are essentially what we're gonna kind of go over today.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. Disposing of that stuff.

• 7:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 04

  We have a pretty good episode on nuclear energy. I can't remember what it was called. Do you happen, did you check that?

• 7:35Josh Clark?

  I, no, I, the only one I can think of where we really talked about what happens in nuclear reactors was Fukushima. The kind of like.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  I thought we did one just on creative nuclear energy, no?

• 7:45Josh Clark?

  I don't know, man. I don't think so.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  All right. Well, we'll go over it quickly again, just how it works. Cause it works how creating energy works at a coal plant or a natural gas plant. Cause what you're essentially trying to do is boil water.

• 7:59Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  To produce steam, and that steam turns to turbine. But in this case, the, the fuel is not coal or natural gas. It's these little uranium 235 pellets. Like I said, the, 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 the reactor and the type, there's anywhere from 150 to about 800 of those bundled up. Cylindrical fuel rods as fuel assemblies in the reactor core.

• 8:41Josh Clark?

  Right, and they're 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 constant flow of water in and out to maintain it at a fairly constant temperature at like 115 Fahrenheit or something like that. And what's great about this is this is a it's a self-contained process.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:16Josh Clark?

  Unlike burning natural coal, natural gas or coal, there's no emissions. And everybody says, hooray, no emissions. And then they say, yes, but we also have this nuclear waste as a result. And everybody says, oh. So that's where we stand. Nuclear power has a lot of promise.

• 9:34Josh Clark?

  If done well, especially with some of the advanced designs that are coming down the pike, it's not a bad energy source. It's just we haven't figured out what to do with the nuclear fuel. 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 it's almost embarrassing that this is what we're doing. We're 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.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  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 spend that fuel, just like a lump of coal would get spent. You got to do the same with the the nuclear stuff. So every, I think, five or six years, it can go before it's basically on empty, but it's 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.

• 10:33Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  So every year and a half to two years, a nuclear reactor is going to close the doors and they're going to cycle through about a third of their fuel assemblies and get rid of those. And that is the the really high level nuclear waste that is the most concerning and the stuff that we need to be the most judicious with.

• 10:54Josh Clark?

  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.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:08Josh Clark?

  Not just for, to carry out the chain reaction that produces power, but also 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 pools every time I say that out loud, but can't. So they're, and they never leave the water. They're taking down these special canals that are, that connect the core, the reactor core to the spent fuel pools and just add a little charm to it. They actually attach them to the bottom of a gondola that takes 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

• 11:53Josh Clark?

  about, has about 40 feet of water in it. And there, I don't know, I think about 10 feet or so tall. So they sink down to the bottom, they've got 20, 30 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.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can look up a picture of a spent fuel pool, and it's really cool looking.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  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 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?

• 12:52Josh Clark?

  Yeah, a fuel assembly, especially a bunch of fuel assemblies exposed to air, would just produce so much heat that they, 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 cesium-137, that spreads in the air very quickly. It settles 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.

• 13:35Josh Clark?

  And this is where, essentially what I was saying, where they just toss them out back. That's what they do, but they put them into something called a dry cask first. And it's a little, a little more technical than just throwing it into a pile. But it's in principle roughly the same thing.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  That's very funny to me that you keep liking it to throwing it out back in a pile.

• 13:57Josh Clark?

  Because that's what they're doing, man. Like these dry casks are, it goes from a pool to a dry cask on the same site. And they just sit there in the, in the dry cask like, okay, you stay here until we can figure out what to do with you 100 years from now.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  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 onsite, 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, the dry cask method in the seventies. And I think in 86, 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 20 feet tall, eight feet in diameter, weigh about 100 tons. And in that cask is several dozen of those fuel assemblies. And again, those fuel assemblies are made up of the individual fuel rods that are holding the pellets.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  So several dozen of those stacked together, sealed inside a canister, they bolt it shut, suck out the air and replace it with inert gas. And then that steel canister is surrounded by a thick concrete wall and they throw it out back.

• 15:13Josh Clark?

  Right. They stand it up out back. And the inert gas acts 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 barite to essentially absorb radioactive particles. So it's like the dry casks are pretty, pretty good. As far as I know, though, they're only rated for about 100 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 1986?

• 15:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:55Josh Clark?

  So we're at 40 years, essentially, already ticking off the clock 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, that how important it is to do it as soon as possible. Because if we don't figure out exactly how to do it and then start building it, that 60 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.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  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 casks, one in New Mexico and one in Texas. These are called consolidated interim storage sites, again, because it's just, you know, temporary. And I think all over the world, about 70% of the fuel that's used up is in pools, about 30% is in these dry casks.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  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 buried in bedrock, which is, we'll see, is maybe a more permanent solution. And in fact, that's the one that the US was working on inside the Yucca Mountain in Nevada. And it had NRC and EPA approval, but Nevada said, nope, we don't want that here. Obama canceled it in 2010. And so far, we don't have a new, sort of, again, scare quote, "permanent solution" here in the US.

• 17:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the big problem is, is in 1987, Congress said Yucca 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 at Yucca Mountain, we'll do 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 120,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, which is a lot, especially considering that the US has only about 90,000 tons of

• 18:36Josh Clark?

  spent fuel total. But we're also adding about 2,000 tons a year, so in 15 years, New Mexico would be full up. So again, you kind of see how this clock is ticking, because it's not like anyone's 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 of industry, you know?

• 18:58Speaker 04

  Uh, maybe we should go-go-go on a break?

• 19:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 19:02Speaker 04

  And I promised talk of Finland earlier, and maybe we'll pick up with that right after this.

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• 19:19Josh Clark?

  Sure.

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  Yeah, because it's a process. There's always something you could do, or buy, or update. The only question is, what's next? For us, our animals just wear out our rugs so quickly. It's usually a new rug.

• 19:30Josh Clark?

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• 22:32Speaker 04

  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 gonna 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.

• 23:03Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 23:04Speaker 04

  But they're calling it permanent. And even so, this one is called Onkalo, which means cavity or pit. 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 1,500 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.

• 23:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and I mean, they're like, in the bedrock, they're talking about 1,430 feet down, which for reference is 220 times deeper than the depth of an Olympic swimming pool.

• 23:43Josh Clark?

  The spent fuel assemblies are put into steel canisters, and then just to show off, Finland surrounds them with a two-inch-thick layer of copper. Because copper won't corrode in the anaerobic conditions down 1,430 feet under the ground. They're putting, um, once they get to that 1,430 feet depth, they go into shafts that are another 30 feet deep, which is 4.6 times deeper than an Olympic pool. And then they stack the canisters one on top of each other. Finally, they top off that 30-foot-deep shaft, and then they fill them with bentonite, which is a clever thing to add, because it's compressed clay that essentially, you remember those little dinosaur sponges that were really tiny, and then you drop water on them, and

• 24:28Josh Clark?

  they turn into like a full-size Tyrannosaurus Rex?

• 24:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:32Josh Clark?

  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 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 canisters open from the surrounding pressure.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  I did not get the memo that we have abandoned Big Macs in favor of, I guess, Olympic pools? What, what happened? Olympic pool means nothing to me.

• 24:58Josh Clark?

  I just, I, you know, it's six and a half feet deep.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  Oh, okay. You know what means something to me? A Big Mac?

• 25:06Josh Clark?

  I know it does, but, um, I don't know. Okay, I'll bring back the Big Macs.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  Well, we don't, we can't pause for you to do that math.

• 25:13Josh Clark?

  No, no, I mean in the future.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 25:15Josh Clark?

  Okay, I'll bring it back for you here or there. Okay.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  Just a little worried. I thought maybe an email got by me.

• 25:22Josh Clark?

  Well, Jerry commanded I leave the Big Macs alone. I think he was

• 25:26Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 25:26Josh Clark?

  on that. Yeah. She said, it's old, Josh, and tired.

• 25:30Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 25:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  And you went, oh, how about Olympic pools?

• 25:33Josh Clark?

  She said, I don't care, as long as it's not Big Macs.

• 25:37Speaker 04

  So that site in Finland can store 3,000 canisters, which is enough to handle Finland. They have five nuclear reactors. And they said, 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 got to shut those things down eventually. But Finland can take care of all their business. They said 120 years or so to fill that thing completely. It'll last 100,000 years. And after 100,000 years, the idea is that it's no longer radioactively dangerous.

• 26:13Josh Clark?

  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.

• 26:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 26:29Josh Clark?

  Other people say 1,000 years. Other people say 10s of thousands of years. Other people point out that an isotope of uranium, I think 236 or 8, has a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

• 26:43Speaker 04

  Doh.

• 26:44Josh Clark?

  It depends on who you talk to, just how long this stuff is really toxic for. But it seems like the stuff that the people are most concerned of are things like iodine 129.

• 26:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 26:56Josh Clark?

  Which has a half-life of 15 million years. It's not good. But then, on the other hand, you have cesium 131, 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 129. But it has a half-life of, I think, like 30 years. So as long, and a lot of the worst stuff actually goes 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?

• 27:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I wonder if they just said. I don't know, 100,000 years, sounds like a long time. Just put that down.

• 27:42Josh Clark?

  You know, you get the impression on some of this that they are saying that because

• 27:47Speaker 04

  Right, like no one will care.

• 27:48Josh Clark?

  Like you would think that, I mean, this is some really studied science. So you would think there 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 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, which 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.

• 28:21Speaker 04

  You know what I bet they do is they say, how many years in the future do you think people no longer like care about their their future family line?

• 28:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  That's like 100,000 years? Yeah, that's great. Put that down.

• 28:34Josh Clark?

  I think it was 100 and they just multiplied it by 1,000.

• 28:38Speaker 04

  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 3% though, of total nuclear waste, but contributes 95% of the total radioactivity. More than 90% of nuclear waste is low level. And this is stuff that, you know, it might be like the protective clothes that you wore 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, one in Washington State, one in Utah, and one in Texas. And this stuff is not nearly as problematic. It

• 29:23Speaker 04

  decays to safe levels in about, again, who knows for sure, but about 20 to 30 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 encased in concrete and covered with backfill.

• 29:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So, yeah, we don't really have to worry too much about low level waste, I think is the upshot of that, right?

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:44Josh Clark?

  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 the neutrons we bombard it with and says, "Oh, let me form some neptunium," which has a half-life of 2.14 million years.

• 30:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:09Josh Clark?

  Or how about some americium? Or plutonium-239 itself has a half-life of greater than 24,000 years. So this stuff is really, um, it's really dangerous, but at the same time, it also is really fissile, meaning it's ready to go. It's, "Hit me with some more neutrons and let's, 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, um, we haven't quite figured out how to use it yet. So in the meantime, uh, it gets dropped into the waste isolation pilot plant. And for long time listeners of the podcast, or those curious enough to go through the

• 30:50Josh Clark?

  back catalog, which is really great, um, we did an episode on nuclear semiotics. Remember that?

• 30:57Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:58Josh Clark?

  Which is essentially trying to figure out how to communicate with people 10,000 years in the future that the waste isolation pilot plant is really dangerous and to steer clear of it. That was probably one of my favorite all-time episodes.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. Uh, and you know, I'm glad you mentioned that real quick. If we could just quickly say, um, we have many, many, many hundreds up to, how many episodes do we have? Couple of thousand?

• 31:21Josh Clark?

  If you include the short stuff, it's coming up on like 2,300, I think.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, a lot of people, like, the reason we mention this is we get emails every single day where people are 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 18 years. And so we have a vast repository of, of things. And if you go to your podcast player, I know on Apple Podcasts, there's a little button you can click at the bottom that says, "Show all episodes." Um, yeah, so. Go forth and listen. And in fact, we did have one from 2014 called Can Nuclear Fusion Reactors Save the World?

• 32:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so that was a good one, too. I love that one. That's different than this.

• 32:04Speaker 04

  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.

• 32:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and our webmaster, Brandon Reed, has put together a world-class search engine on our site, stuffyoushouldknow.com. So if you type in any keyword of something you're looking for, it's probably going to bring up that 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 back catalog. It's almost geologic in its stretch.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  How many Olympic pools deep is it?

• 32:41Josh Clark?

  At least 10, 15 million, I would say.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Okay. So back to the waste isolation pilot plant in New Mexico. Here, they bury this transuranic. Is that how you said it?

• 32:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  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.

• 33:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  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 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, 60 years is like the maximum limit before they say, shut this thing down.

• 33:36Josh Clark?

  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 plant is made from, I saw that only about 1% of it is radioactive. The rest can just be treated as construction waste, essentially. I saw a proposal saying, like, don't do that. Like, reuse this stuff as the concrete, like, recycle it. That is the concrete that seals in the dry casks and stuff like that.

• 34:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:07Josh Clark?

  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. Um, and one of the parts of this process is making sure all those fuel assemblies, spent 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 plant will be taken offline, decommissioned. It's not producing power any longer, but it still has all those fuel rods in its spent fuel pool.

• 34:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:37Josh Clark?

  It still has dry casks out back and there's still people watching over that stuff. Because we don't have anywhere to put it. We're literally leaving them in the 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.

• 34:54Speaker 04

  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, uh, pool of, um, I imagine very soothing nuclear water. Uh, that was used as a coolant and you gotta do something with that. Uh, and what we do with it. And I guess, you know, what's basically done with it all over 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, are by a body of water for this reason. Uh, 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 I just don't see how that water can ever be

• 35:38Speaker 04

  good enough to dump into an ocean or a lake.

• 35:41Josh Clark?

  The only thing I've seen is dilution that, that full, first of all, so they filter out as much of the radionuclides as possible. Right?

• 35:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:49Josh Clark?

  And there's whole processes for, for separating those things out from the water. But there's still some left. But the, their premise is that they're adding so much fresh water to it.

• 35:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:58Josh Clark?

  Before they dump it into the ocean. It's fine, but I think that's 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, it's like, really? That's what we can do? That's the best we can do right now? And the answer is yes.

• 36:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, that's, if I don't mention the three eyed fish on The Simpsons, we're gonna get emails. So I guess that we have to mention that, right?

• 36:38Josh Clark?

  You bet, man.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  Did that fish have a name?

• 36:41Josh Clark?

  Blinkie, I think.

• 36:43Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 36:43Josh Clark?

  I'm pretty sure.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  Didn't it blink in sequence?

• 36:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  Like blink blink blink?

• 36:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 36:51Speaker 04

  That's very funny.

• 36:51Josh Clark?

  It was a pretty cool fish.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, so 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.

• 37:14Josh Clark?

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• 37:37Josh Clark?

  Or discover Toyota's off-road lineup, including the iconic 4Runner and Land Cruiser, designed to go beyond the everyday. And with Toyota's proven reputation for quality and reliability, plus hybrid power on many models, you can get more for every mile and drive for less along the way.

• 37:52Speaker 04

  That's right. And long after you leave the lot, your Toyota keeps delivering with great resale value. So you could trade in for more when you're ready for your next Toyota. From a great deal today to a great value tomorrow, a Toyota is right for you. Shop toyota.com for deals and details, or stop by your local Toyota dealer today. Toyota, let's go places.

• 38:14Speaker 06

  This stress check, AKA friendly reminder that your hobbies matter, is brought to you by State Farm, because you deserve to lose yourself in the stuff that brings you joy. Here's mine: painting my tabletop battle miniatures. Yeah, seriously. After a long day, I grab a brush, pop in some music, and just get into it. And there's no wrong way to do it. It helps me clear my head, slow down, and just breathe. But it works. Big stress, mini warriors, total reset. No pressure, just paint, creativity, and a little reminder of what makes me happy. Some people bake, some people garden. Me, I paint warriors with interesting tech. And guess what? It works. You don't have to be good at your hobby, you just have to enjoy it.

• 38:59Speaker 06

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• 39:08Speaker 07

  Hey, I'm Nile Rodgers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Chic. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel...

• 39:41Speaker 02

  That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life. Regardless of how everyone else buys into this, I believe in this and I'm gonna push.

• 39:53Speaker 07

  To rising stars like Alex Warren.

• 39:56Josh Clark?

  You know, a song is a story, and the verse is setting the scene. And for me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience, whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents and I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story.

• 40:14Speaker 07

  It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 40:38Josh Clark?

  Okay Chuck, 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, right?

• 40:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, like you can recycle this stuff.

• 40:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because there's a couple of things. One is when a nuclear fuel rod is spent, it still has like a lot of energy left in it. It's just, like you said, not enough energy to power an old school nuclear reactor.

• 41:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:11Josh Clark?

  So one solution is to develop 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, 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 it and

• 41:53Josh Clark?

  forget it, you're burying all of that energy. There's so much energy, there's a startup called Oklo and 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 150 years, just with the spent nuclear fuel we have right now. And the idea is to just bury it 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 2010. And it's in limbo because it bought time for people to come up with other ideas rather

• 42:36Josh Clark?

  than just bury the stuff that's just such a total waste.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, Oaklow says they can recycle and reuse 94% of uranium in those spent fuel assemblies. And they're just one of 10 companies. I think they they got a license from the Department of Energy to build a recycling plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Shout out to the boys.

• 42:57Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  And they're one of 10 companies that the Department of Energy selected as part of their reactor pilot program to 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 make a dirty bomb or something for that. So it needs to be pretty locked down.

• 43:35Josh Clark?

  And the same fear, except even worse, is associated with extracting plutonium

• 43:43Josh Clark?

  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 extracting it in 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.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, they could fix that, though.

• 44:16Josh Clark?

  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, yeah, that's a huge risk, but it's not something we can't figure out, you know?

• 44:33Speaker 04

  Well, I feel like it'd probably have to be in working in concert with the government and not just saying like, all right, Oaklow, you got your security team, let's see those people with the black eyes on. It's all good.

• 44:46Josh Clark?

  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, to help fund them to build nuclear plants to power their AI. So these are like, like I think Ochlo is backed by Sam Altman from OpenAI. 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 power their increasingly massive

• 45:30Josh Clark?

  artificial intelligences. That's, I think, makes some people wary, including me.

• 45:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, combining those businesses is a little, it's a little worrisome.

• 45:42Josh Clark?

  It is. And I can't, I can't let an opportunity pass to shout out, "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies", by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. It's so good, where they just lay out the, 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 not like they're AI haters. They're just basically saying like, "We're going 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 Luddites or anything like that, and they know what they're talking about. It's just a good book.

• 46:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, you know, with things, how things are going these days, I could use a little pick-me-up. So maybe a little light reading, maybe I'll start that.

• 46:27Josh Clark?

  Again, it is like you could read it in a day, man.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  A very depressing day.

• 46:33Josh Clark?

  It's good, though. It's, 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.

• 46:43Speaker 04

  All right, 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're, you know, extracting the most highly radioactive parts of this waste from everything else, seems like that's headed toward like a pretty, a pretty good solution. So they don't know quite what to do with it afterward. But one way of doing it is something called transmutation, right?

• 47:15Josh Clark?

  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.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:28Josh Clark?

  And by doing so, you actually either, you either change them, a neutron knocks some proton or some, 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 and you're degrading it really quickly in a particle accelerator. And if you do it correctly, I guess, in principle, I think all of this is theoretical right now.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:05Josh Clark?

  You could actually produce energy while you're doing this. While you're getting rid of waste, you could be producing energy from the bombardment. Bombardment!

• 48:16Speaker 04

  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 nucleids that you were talking about. And for like, a long period of time. And, you know, the idea is that you, you store this stuff in these like, like, glass logs or ceramic logs, basically. 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.

• 48:58Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And what's cool about it is the glass logs don't act as like container that you put waste in. You melt the glass making minerals and the waste together and it forms a 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.

• 49:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I thought that was clear. But yeah, it's uh, thanks for clearing that up.

• 49:23Josh Clark?

  You're welcome. And you can also do the same thing with ceramics too, apparently.

• 49:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, ceramics uh, work just as good. Um, we can also recycle the uh, fissile material. We're trying to, you know, the goal there is to recover uranium and plutonium, the the main materials, main fissile materials. Uh, and again, separating out the most radioactive parts of the waste product is is what you're doing is you're trying just to to make it all less um, bad, less radioactive.

• 49:53Josh Clark?

  For sure. And then hopefully doing something with it, like turning it back into pellets. Like I saw to make a mixed um, uranium plutonium oxide, MOx fuel. You can use eight old pellets to create one new one. So it actually is pretty efficient. Uh, and you can keep doing that over and over again, um, until essentially you just don't have enough left to 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

• 50:35Josh Clark?

  that it would take a huge amount of our problem for figuring out what to do with the waste off of the table. So like if that stuff is 1% of all nuclear waste and the United States has 90,000 tons of it, that would drop it down to just 900 tons of really problematic stuff that we had to figure out how to get rid of, not 90,000. So there's, I mean, aside from that security risk thing, there's really no reason not to process nuclear waste to get the high energy stuff out of there for one reason or another.

• 51:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure.

• 51:07Josh Clark?

  I think that's it, man.

• 51:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. Go forth and recycle your uranium pellets in your home.

• 51:14Josh Clark?

  That's right Chuck. And since Chuck talked about recycling uranium pellets, obviously it's time for listener mail.

• 51:22Speaker 04

  Uh, this is from Kelly Gizmandy. Hey, guys. I'm a lawyer in Louisiana. Started listening to Stuff You Should Know a few years ago and currently working my way through the backlog 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 that was recently published by Calvin Duncan, who was wrongly, uh, wrongfully convicted, by the way, is called The Jailhouse Lawyer, uh, which is a deep dive into, um, what, uh, life is like for inmate counsel.

• 51:54Josh Clark?

  Wow.

• 51:55Speaker 04

  Uh, inmate counsel are a group of incarcerated folks who learn and then teach others, uh, the law, draft motions and legal filings for others who are incarcerated and help advocate for those incarcerated as a whole. Uh, this is an essential service for the incarcerated community because there is no right to free counsel for post-conviction relief and many people who have been convicted of crimes cannot afford legal fees for post-conviction relief.

• 52:17Josh Clark?

  Man.

• 52:18Speaker 04

  Uh, essentially, if you are poor and have been wrongfully convicted of a crime or if there's another, uh, legal issue with your conviction, often the only way to get legal help is to work with inmate counsel. Uh, 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. Uh, thanks for all you do for my brain. That is sincerely from Kelly Gizmandy. And Kelly, that may be a good short stuff. There's not a ton out there, but, uh, I bet you we could find 15 minutes, easy.

• 52:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, let's do it, man. Cause that is definitely, as far as I'm concerned, an overlooked issue in

• 52:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:55Josh Clark?

  in the justice system, for sure.

• 52:57Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 52:58Josh Clark?

  Uh, well, God bless you, Kelly, for what you're doing, your work, helping people who, uh, may have gotten screwed over by the system. Uh, 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 [email protected].

• 53:20Speaker 03

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 53:36Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 54:10Josh Clark?

  Welcome to the Haunted Library.

• 54:14Josh Clark?

  Have you come in search of a tale? This podcast invites you to browse the shelves

• 54:20Speaker 00

  and find stories that will linger long after you've left this place. From Gothic masterpieces to poppy penny dreadfuls, join me, Colin Morgan, with new episodes twice a week. Find the Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.