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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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.
Are you talking about the green goo?
Yeah, I mean, it's just hard not to think of Homer Simpson when you're talking about nuclear power at all.
Yeah, and nuclear waste in particular, right?
Yeah, like, you know, that little rod flies right into his hood.
Right.
This inanimate carbon rod is the employee of the year, I think.
That's right.
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 Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen.
Never saw it.
It's good.
As far as 80s comedies go, it's pretty good.
Yeah?
All right.
And they play a lot of 2 Live Crew, too.
Oh, wow.
There you go.
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.
Mm-hmm.
Gross and dangerous, you know?
Yeah, it's not a sandwich you want.
Unless you cut the crust off.
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 is brought in.
Yeah, that's right.
And this is clearly the most dangerous kind of nuclear waste.
We're going to go over 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.
Right.
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.
Okay, half thumb.
Anything but metric.
Yeah, not the thumb stump.
Like the actual thumb print section of your thumb.
The thumb sprout.
Yeah, the thumb sprout, exactly.
And you know, disposing of this stuff is sort of the highest level of concern because we have to do it safely right.
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 50000 years.
And we were going to 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 potentially a brighter future ahead with some pretty ingenious ideas.
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.
Yep.
The moment you die.
In a couple of years.
All of it now.
Far longer than that.
I hope so.
All of that nuclear waste would be compressed to about a hockey puck.
So each of us in the United States have a hockey puck'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.
That's right.
And, by the way, if people think I do have Chuck Stradama's powers of the future, please do not get concerned that I foretold my death in two years.
It's okay.
Okay.
I don't know if that erased it for everybody, but all right.
It was a good attempt.
I could just hear someone out there being like, oh, no, no, no.
Chuck said he's going to die in two years.
He shan't even say things like that, lest we forget Jared and Hugh Jackman.
I mean, I don't like you saying it, but I'm nervously laughing instead.
All right.
So we should kind of quickly go over how nuclear reactors work, even though we have a pretty great episode on that.
But 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 90000 tons, which is eye-popping in the United States alone.
It's eye-popping, but it's actually not that much.
The problem is 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 going to kind of go over today.
Yeah.
Disposing of that stuff.
Yeah.
We have a pretty good episode on nuclear energy.
I can't remember what it was called.
Do you happen?
Did you check that?
No, the only one I can think of where we really talked about what happens in nuclear reactors was Fukushima.
I thought we did one just on creating nuclear energy, no?
I don't know, man.
I don't think so.
All right.
Well, we'll go over it quickly again, just how it works.
Because it works, how creating energy works at a coal plant or a natural gas plant, because what you're essentially trying to do is boil water to produce steam, and that steam turns a turbine.
But in this case, the fuel is not coal or natural gas.
It's these little uranium-235 pellets.
Like I said, 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.
Wow.
Right.
And they're kept underwater.
And the water does a couple of things.
One.
It actually helps carry out the nuclear chain reaction that produces the heat, that boils the water, that produces the steam, that turns the turbine, that creates the electricity right.
Mm-hmm.
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 like 115 Fahrenheit or something like that.
And what's great about this is it's a self-contained process.
Unlike burning natural gas or coal, there's no emissions there.
And everybody says, hooray, no emissions.
And then they say, yes, but we also have this nuclear waste as a result.
And everybody says, aw.
So that's where we stand.
Nuclear power has a lot of promise.
It's 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 almost embarrassing that this is what we're doing.
We're just basically – stashing it over here until we can figure out what to do with it in the long term.
And we've been doing that for half a century.
Yeah, yeah, it's been going on for a long time.
The thing is, you know, these things wear out, which is why we have to remove.
You know, once you spin that fuel, just like a lump of coal would get spent.
You got to do the same with the nuclear stuff.
So every I think five or six years it can go before 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.
Right, right.
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 really high level nuclear waste.
That is the most concerning and the stuff that we need to be the most judicious with.
Yes, very fortunately they don't just take these fuel assemblies and toss them out back into an ever-growing pile.
They kind of do, but there's a little more to it.
What they do initially is so remember these things are underwater, and they're underwater for a reason not just 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 pules every time I say that out loud, but I can't.
And they never leave the water.
They're taking down these special canals that connect the reactor core to the spent fuel pools.
And just to 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 fuel pool, they're basically dropped into this huge pool, stainless steel pool that has about 40 feet of water in it.
And they're, 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.
Yeah, you can look up a picture of a spent fuel pool, and it's really cool looking.
And like you said, I mean, two to five years just for these things to cool off.
They decay a little bit as far as the radioactivity goes, but that's a process that for the most critical stuff that takes 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?
Yeah.
A fuel assembly, especially a bunch of fuel assemblies exposed to air, would just produce so much heat that they would blow up.
And when they blew up...
Remember, these are fairly recent spent fuel rods.
They would release a lot of really bad stuff, like 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.
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 more technical than just throwing it into a pile, but it's in principle roughly the same thing.
That's very funny to me that you keep liking it to throwing it out back in a pile.
Because that's what they're doing, man.
Like these dry casks, it goes from a pool to a dry cask on the same site.
And they just sit there in the dry cask like okay, you stay here until we can figure out what to do with you 100 years from now.
So for the first couple of decades that we had this stuff, all of it was just in those cooling pools.
But those pools started to fill up.
They're all on site.
It's not like they have to transport them, except very locally via canal.
And then they said, hey, these pools are filling up.
We've got to come up with a better way.
They started looking into the dry cask method in the 70s 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.
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.
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?
Yeah.
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...
It makes this getting to a solution of what to do long-term permanent storage essentially how important it is to do it as soon as possible.
Because if we 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.
Yeah, for sure.
Right now, the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The NRC, is looking at applications for a couple of larger storage sites here in the US for those dry casts, one in New Mexico and one in Texas.
These are called consolidated interim storage sites, again, because it's just, you know, temporary.
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.
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 we'll see is maybe a more permanent solution.
And in fact that's the one that they're – 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 U.S.
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 120000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, which is a lot, especially considering that the US has only about 90000 tons of 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.
It's just a go, go, go swinging kind of industry, you know?
Yeah.
Maybe we should go, go, go on a break.
Yeah.
And I promised talk of Finland earlier, and maybe we'll pick up with that right after this.
Here we go.
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Learn some stuff with Joshua and Charles Stuff.
You should know 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 sent me some information that was like hey, nobody knows what's going to happen in thousands and thousands of years.
So you can't really call it permanent when there's climate change and potential asteroid impacts and things like that.
We just don't know what's coming our way.
So you can't really say it's permanent.
Right.
But they're calling it permanent, even so.
This one is called Oncolo, which means cavity or pit.
And it's the first on planet Earth geologic repository where supposedly, you know, they say that you can store this stuff, you know, close to 1500 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.
Yeah, and I mean they're like in the bedrock.
They're talking about 1430 feet down which, for reference, is 220 times deeper than the depth of an Olympic swimming pool.
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 1430 feet under the ground.
Once they get to that 1430 feet depth, they go into shafts that are another 30 feet deep, which is 46 times deeper than an Olympic pool.
Wow.
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 they turn into like a full size Tyrannosaurus rex.
Yeah.
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.
I did not get the memo that we have abandoned Big Macs in favor of, I guess, Olympic pools?
What happened?
Olympic pool means nothing to me.
I just, you know, it's six and a half feet deep.
Oh, okay.
You know what means something to me?
A Big Mac.
I know it does, but I don't know.
Okay, I'll bring back the Big Macs.
Well, we can't pause for you to do that math.
No, no, I mean in the future.
Okay, all right.
Okay, I'll bring it back for you here or there.
All right.
Okay.
I was just a little worried.
I thought maybe an email got by me.
Well, Jerry commanded I leave the Big Macs alone.
I think you were so sweet on that.
Yeah.
She said it's old, Josh, and tired.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
And you went, how about Olympic pools?
She said, I don't care as long as it's not Big Macs.
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've 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.
Right, which is just wrong.
It depends on what source you go to.
And it's not clear like one's from one side and one's from another side.
It really depends on the source.
Some people say nuclear waste is really just dangerous for the first few decades, right?
Other people say 1,000 years.
Other people say tens of thousands of years.
Other people point out that an isotope of uranium, I think 236 or 8, has a half-life of 45 billion years.
So 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, 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.
Right. 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.
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.
Yeah, I wonder if they just said, I don't know, 100,000 years sounds like a long time.
Just put that down.
You know, you get the impression on some of this that they are saying that because there doesn't seem –.
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.
You know what I bet they do is they say how many years in the future do you think people no longer care about their future family line?
That's like 100,000 years?
Yeah, that's great.
Put that down.
I think it was 100 and they just multiplied it by 1,000.
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 U.S. 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 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.
Yeah.
So yeah, we don't really have to worry too much about low-level waste.
I think is the upshot of that right.
Yeah.
There's also transuranic waste, which has incredibly long half-lives.
And these are often called defense wastes because they are produced when we produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Yeah.
So sometimes plutonium grabs on to some of the neutrons we've bombarded with and says oh, let me form some neptunium which has a half-life of 214 million years.
Or how about some americium?
Or plutonium-239 itself has a half-life of greater than 24,000 years.
So this stuff is really...
It's really dangerous, but at the same time, it also is really fissile, meaning it's ready to go.
Hit me with some more neutrons and let's split some more atoms so we can release some more energy.
So it's not necessarily a problem if we can figure out what to do with it.
It's just that we haven't quite figured out how to use it yet.
So in the meantime, it gets dropped into the waste isolation pilot plant.
And for longtime listeners of the podcast?
Are those curious enough to go through the back catalog, which is really great?
We did an episode on nuclear semiotics.
Remember that?
Oh, yeah.
Which is essentially trying to figure out how to communicate with people 10000 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.
Yeah, for sure.
And, you know, I'm glad you mentioned that real quick.
If we could just quickly say we have many, many, many hundreds up to how many episodes do we have?
A couple of thousand.
If you include the short stuff, it's coming up on like twenty three hundred, I think.
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 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.
Yeah, so...
Go forth and listen.
And in fact, we did have one from 2014 called Can Nuclear Fusion Reactors Save the World?
Yeah, so that was a good one, too.
I love that one.
That's different than this.
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.
Yeah, and our webmaster, Brandon Reed, has put together a world-class search engine on our site, stuffyoushouldknowcom.
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.
How many Olympic pools deep is it?
At least 10, 15 million, I would say.
Okay.
Okay.
So back to the waste isolation pilot plant in New Mexico.
Here they bury this transuranic – is that how you said it?
Yeah.
Okay.
Inside a salt layer that's a couple of thousand feet below the surface and salt doesn't have any – maybe a little bit, but basically no groundwater flow.
And water is 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 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.
Yeah.
And strangely I did not realize this but most of the contaminated stuff is low-level waste like 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 as the concrete that seals in the dry casks and stuff like that.
So there's actually, there seems to be much more of a push to recycle all this stuff as we'll see.
But there's a whole process to decommissioning.
And one of 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.
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.
Yeah.
And there's that water in the pools.
Like, let's say you finally get all of them out of the pool and in dry cask.
Then you got a big pool of, I imagine, very soothing nuclear water that was used as a coolant.
And you got to do something with that and what we do with it.
And I guess you know what's basically done with it all over the world is it's cleaned and then dumped into a waterway, an ocean or a river or a lake, and most of these plants are by a body of water.
For this reason,
And you know we'll talk a little bit about how this is done, the two main processes but I'm not like a conspiracy guy or hugely cynical, but I just don't see how that water could ever be good enough to dump into an ocean or a lake.
The only thing I've seen is dilution.
First of all, so they filter out as much of the radionuclides as possible, right?
Yeah.
And there's whole processes for separating those things out from the water.
But there's still some left.
But their premise is that they're adding so much fresh water to it before they dump it into the ocean.
It's fine.
But I think that's a very valid point.
Yeah.
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 going to 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.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, if I don't mention the three-eyed fish on The Simpsons, we're going to get emails.
I guess that we have to mention that, right?
You bet, man.
Did that fish have a name?
Blinky, I think.
Oh, really?
I'm pretty sure.
Didn't it blink in sequence?
Yeah.
Like, blink, blink, blink?
Yeah.
That's very funny.
That was a pretty cool fish.
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.
Here we go.
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Learn some stuff with Joshua and Charles.
Stuff you should know.
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,
Yeah, like you can recycle this stuff.
Yeah, because there's a couple of things.
One is when a nuclear fuel rod is spent, it still has like – like a lot of energy left in it.
It's just like you said, not enough energy to power an old school nuclear reactor.
Yeah.
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 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 forget it, you're burying all of that energy.
There's so much energy.
There's a startup called Oklo, and they...
They estimate that the unused spent fuel that we're talking about just burying thousands of feet under the ground could power the United States, the entire United States, for the next 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 than just bury the stuff.
That's just such a total waste.
Yeah.
Oklo 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 got a license from the Department of Energy to build a recycling plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Shout out to the boys.
Sure.
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 unspent nests.
You could also make a dirty bomb or something for that.
So it needs to be pretty, pretty locked down.
And the same fear, except even worse, is associated with extracting plutonium from spent nuclear fuel.
To use that, because that is the core of a nuclear weapon.
And that's the kind of thing that a foreign country that doesn't have a nuclear program but really wants one has the resources to steal from some startup that is refining and extracting it in their facility in Tennessee.
That's actually, from what I can tell, the number one obstacle to recycling nuclear waste that security concern.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, they could fix that, though.
I guess.
I mean, we keep our nuclear stockpile safe and 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.
Well, I feel like it probably have to be in working in concert with the government and not just saying like all right Oklo, you got your security team.
I see those people with the black the black eyes on.
It's all good.
Yeah.
So one of the other things we should say I think that people are kind of wary about, is that these startups that are talking about new ideas for nuclear power are typically doing it to get government buy-in to help fund them to build nuclear plants to power their AI.
So these are like... I think Oklo 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 artificial intelligences.
That's, I think, makes some people wary, including me.
Yeah.
I mean, combining those businesses is a little...
It's a little worrisome.
It is.
And 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 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.
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.
Again, it is like you could read it in a day, man. a very depressing day.
It's good, though.
It's really interesting too, because it's also a peek inside the current state of the AI industry too.
Like, they're insiders.
They know what's going on.
All right.
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 material parts of this waste from everything else.
Seems like that's headed toward like 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?
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.
Yeah.
And by doing so you actually either change them.
A neutron knocks some proton or something 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.
Yeah.
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.
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 radionuclides that you were talking about for a long period of time.
And the idea is that you store this stuff in these 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.
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 the glass log together.
So like you're actually trapping the radioactive particles in glass, not inside glass as part of glass.
It's really genius.
Yeah, yeah.
I thought that was clear.
But yeah, thanks for clearing that up.
You're welcome.
And you can also do the same thing with ceramics too, apparently.
Yeah, ceramics work just as good.
We can also recycle the fissile material.
We're trying to you know the goal there is to recover uranium and plutonium, the main materials, main fissile materials.
And again, separating out the most radioactive parts of the waste product is what you're doing?
Is you're trying just to make it all less bad, less radioactive?
Right.
For sure.
And then hopefully doing something with it, like turning it back into pellets.
Like I saw, to make a mixed uranium, plutonium oxide, MOX fuel.
You can use eight old pellets to create one new one.
So it actually is pretty efficient.
And you can keep doing that over and over again until essentially you just don't have enough left to actually produce any energy.
And one of the other points that I saw Chuck, is that Even if we can't figure out how to reuse the fuel that we've isolated and extracted from the spent nuclear fuel waste, just being able to do that would reduce it by so much that it would take a huge amount of our problem for figuring out what to do with the waste off of the table.
So if that stuff is 1 of all nuclear waste and the United States has 90000 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 90000.
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.
Yeah, for sure.
I think that's it, man.
Yeah.
Go forth and recycle your uranium pellets in your home.
That's right, Chuck.
And since Chuck talked about recycling uranium pellets, obviously it's time for Listener Mail.
This is from Kelly Gizmondi.
Hey, guys.
I'm a lawyer in Louisiana.
I started listening to Stuff, You Should Know, a few years ago and currently working my way through the backlog and enjoying every minute.
I just got done listening to your solitary confinement episode and was thrilled to hear you talk about the Angola 3.
I have represented folks from Angola and one of the most interesting stories from Angola is that was recently published by Calvin Duncan, who was wrongfully convicted, by the way.
It's called The Jailhouse Lawyer, which is a deep dive into what life is like for inmate counsel.
Inmate counsel are a group of incarcerated folks who learn and then teach others the law, draft motions and legal filings for others who are incarcerated and help advocate for those incarcerated as a whole.
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.
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Often the only way to get legal help is to work with inmate counsel.
They're incredibly effective and have helped get thousands of incarcerated folks across Louisiana home to their communities.
Would love to hear an episode on this.
Thanks for all you do for my brain.
That is sincerely from Kelly Gizmondi.
And Kelly, that may be a good short stuff.
There's not a ton out there, but I bet you we could find 15 minutes easy.
Yeah, let's do it, man.
Because that is definitely, as far as I'm concerned, an overlooked issue in the justice system, for sure.
Yep.
Well, God bless you Kelly, for what you're doing, your work helping people who may have gotten screwed over by the system.
And if you want to be like Kelly and email us to let us know what you're doing to help your fellow person.
We want to hear about that.
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Each week, I'm calling up my friends like Bill Nye, Lilly Singh, and Pete Buttigieg to talk about everything from the space race to movie remakes to psychedelics.
Put another way, are you high?
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