[SOUND] So let's say you've got these casks of nuclear waste and you want to bring them some place, whether it's a storage facility or maybe you just collect the dry storage together in one spot. How safe is that? You'd hate to have this thing roll off a truck and break open in your yard. So, let's examine exactly what is one of these casks that can transport the waste. This is one that's designed for a truck. And you notice that we have a very strong outer shell and parts of it that are designed to take impact. Now, since the fuel that's inside is radioactive, it can give off gammas, it can also even give off neutrons. So, it gives off alphas and betas, too, but they don't even get out of the fuel. So, we have a special shielding layer for gammas, a special shielding layer for neutrons, and the whole thing is in a very safe enclosure. Sometimes it's more convenient to transport by rail, so there's a rail cask. Very similarly designed just bigger of course because trucks can actually fit on rail cars so we can make a bigger cask. Now getting this someplace was something that was under a lot of concern and in the 1970s it was apparent that we needed to start moving some of this nuclear waste around. Mostly, the military did, but even if the military was going to move around the nuclear waste they had made, perhaps to work in the weapons program or other nuclear waste, they needed to still use everyone's roads. So how safe could they make this? Well, they did a lot of work on it and made an awesome test video. Free to the public for people to witness, to see that you really should have no fear that if one of these trucks crash, that you'll have any type of problem. Let's run the video tape. So first, if you were following along one of these casks on the road, you shouldn't worry that it's just going to just fall off and no one will notice. Because the trucks that carry it around, clearly have cars chasing them, following them. And if the truck driver suddenly doesn't have that on the back of his truck, you're going to know. But what about the worry that it might have fallen off and broken, and cracked open and caused this radioactive spill. Well they made sure to design these cases so that wouldn't happen. And you do all sorts of computer modeling, you make test models. But of course, the real test is to do it for a full size cask with lots of instrumentation on it and movies. So they made one and they put it on a truck. And they put some rocket engines on the back of the truck. Clearly, there's no driver. And this rocket propelled truck crashes rather spectacularly into a giant concrete block. After the crash, they examine the cask. It's not broken open. It has so little damage that they do it again at 80 miles an hour, this looks like maybe we might've scarred it. When you look at this you say, no! The whole top's going to come off! No, that's part of the truck. All right. But that's not enough. What if after the crash happened, a train hit it? So, let's take that cask and get a rocket powered train and have a rocket powered train run into the fuel cask. Hm, a couple of dents, a couple of dings. All the content inside just fine. Some of these casks are actually transported by rail, so we'd better check what happens if we have a runaway train car that that hits our big concrete block. Again, the cask is fine, but you know what? A jet air plane could crash on it And what brought down the World Trade Center was not the impact of the plane, right? It was the fire from the jet fuel. So let's conveniently put our train, crashed cask in a pool of jet fuel and burn it for an hour and a half just to see if anything opens up, anything could leak out, and so forth. And the wonderful result of this, extensive crashing with a truck, crashing with a train, crashing with a rail car, and then burning is that the cask was intact and justifying. There might be things to be concerned about nuclear power, particularly the economics. But actually, transporting nuclear waste is not one of those. So there you've seen the video. There's one the British government did too, which was really kind of neat, because they have music. And they have a long train car, the train goes runaway on a track, 100 miles an hour, and then crashes, and they have all the things. Same effect. You can design a container that won't break under all these types of impacts. What do they look like today? Well, very similar. Maybe a little larger, but just as safe. Here's one for rail cars and here's one for trucks. Transportation of nuclear waste, and again there's very little of it, is safe. That's what you need to know. [MUSIC]