What To Do With All This Nuclear Waste?

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0:45Hey, 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.

1:01Are 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.

1:39Never saw it. It's good. As far as 80s comedies go, it's pretty good. Yeah, all right. And they play a lot of two live crew too. Oh, well, 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, which is 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, metals and all sorts of crud pressed together to form essentially a uranium fuel is what it starts out as.

2:36But 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, 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. 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.

3:15Okay, half thumb. Anything but metric. Yeah, not the thumb stump, like the actual thumbprint 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. 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 permanent solution because who knows what permanent means, you know, in 50 ,000 years. And we were going to build one of these in 2010, and we'll talk about why that didn't happen.

4:01But 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, moment of birth.

4:47Yep. The moment you die. In a couple of years. All of now, far longer than that. I hope so. All of that nuclear waste would be compressed to about a hockey puck. So each of us in the United States have a hockey puck worth of nuclear waste assigned to us, and each of us has to figure out what to do with that hockey puck individually. That's the new standard. 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. Okay. I don't know if that erased it for everybody, but all right. It was a good attempt.

5:25I could just hear someone out there being like, oh, no, no, no. Chuck said he's going to die in two years. That's he shan't even say things like that. Lest we forget Jared and Hugh Jackman. I mean, I don't like you saying it, but, you know, I'm just 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 90 ,000 tons, which is eye-popping in the United States alone.

5:59It'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.

6:42I 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.

7:24And 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. Right. And they're kept underwater. And the water does a couple of things. One, it actually helps carry out the nuclear chain reaction that produces the heat that boils the water that produces the steam that turns the turbine that creates the electricity, right? But it also keeps it from going critical. It also cools it. So there's a constant flow of water in and out to maintain it at a fairly constant temperature at like 115 Fahrenheit or something like that.

8:07And what's great about this is it's a self-contained process. Unlike burning 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, aw. So that's where we stand. Nuclear power has a lot of promise. If done well, especially with some of the advanced designs that are coming down the pike, 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.

8:53We'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 spend that fuel, just like a lump of coal would get spent. You've 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.

9:29Right. 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. Right. What they do initially is, so remember these things are underwater, and they're underwater for a reason.

10:05Yeah. 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 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 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 has about 40 feet of water in it.

10:53and they're, I don't know, I think about 10 feet or so tall. So they sink down to the bottom and 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, you know, that's a process that for the most critical stuff that takes, you know, thousands of years.

11:32So 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. 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.

12:12It 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.

12:53Because 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. 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've got to come up with a better way. They started looking into the dry cask method in the 70s.

13:30And 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, 8 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 stack 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.

14:09Right. 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 good. But 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.

14:51So 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.

15:36Yeah, 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 U.S. for those drycasts, 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 percent of the fuel that's used up is in pools. About 30 percent is in these dry casks. And, you know, these things supposedly are built to withstand natural disasters and things like that. But like you said, like they're stored either on or near the surface.

16:18It'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 U.S. 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.

17:03And 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 U.S. has only about 90 ,000 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 saying, well, let's wait on nuclear power any further until we figure out what to do with this.

17:49They're just it's just a go, go, go swinging kind of industry, you know. Maybe we should go, go, go on a break. Yeah. And I promised talk of Finland earlier and maybe we'll pick up with that right after this.

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19:49All right. So we mentioned Finland early on as being kind of the only place in the world now that is close to being done with a, again, scare quote permanent solution. And the reason we keep saying scare quotes is because, you know, you sent me some information that was like, hey, nobody knows what's going to 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. Like 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.

20:23Even so. This one is called Oncalo, 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 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. 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. 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.

21:09Because copper won't corrode in the anaerobic conditions down 1 ,430 feet under the ground. They're putting, 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 they turn into like a full-size Tyrannosaurus rex?

21:48Yeah. 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.

22:27Well, 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 suscite 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.

23:15You'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. Other people say a thousand 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 4.5 billion years.

24:00So it depends on who you talk to, just how long the stuff is really toxic for. But it seems like the stuff that the people are most concerned of are things like iodine-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, 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?

24:53Yeah, 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— Like no one will care. 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.

25:38You 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 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.