[SOUND] Everybody has always heard about nuclear waste. Well, what is it? Let's take up a periodic table here, all right. So, the basic idea is you’re splitting up uranium. Uranium, right here, element 92, the heaviest naturally occurring element. There’s a couple of different isotopes of uranium. Uranium 238, that just basically goes along for the ride, and uranium 235 that is fissile, meaning, it will fission with any energy neutron. That's the good stuff. So, the uranium splits up, and it splits up conserving the number of neutrons and protons. But it doesn't always go to the same thing. It generally goes into this middle part of the periodic table, the fission products. And because there's too many neutrons around, most of those fission products are radioactive, and then they in turn turn into a different element and eventually into stable elements. So that's the main business that's going on. But you know that U238 was going along for the ride. Sometimes, some extra neutrons hit it and it makes it the next element, neptunium, number 93, or even plutonium, number 94, or Americium, number 95, or Curium, number 96. So, just how much of this material are we talking about? Well, let's put down a few numbers. A reactor starts with about 30 tons of fuel, 29 tons of uranium 238. And since it was at about 3% enrichment, it's 1 ton of uranium 235. This is your starting fuel, approximately 3% enriched. After three years, what's left in the reactor? Well, that 1 ton of uranium 235, that's the main thing that we want to split up. It goes down to about a third of a ton. That's our fuel, that's what we used up. But you know what? The uranium that's been hit by all these neutrons, all the uranium 238, some of it gets transmuted into these heavier elements as well, and even some of it fissions. So there's about 28 and a half tons more or less, still, of the uranium 238. You add that up and say hm, well, we're not at 30 yet. What about the things the uranium split into? That's the biggest constituent, 0.80 tons of the fission products. Not all one element, a whole mismatch of different, mostly radioactive materials in the mid range of the periodic table. There are also things that are heavier than uranium, transuranics. And the most prevalent one is plutonium, 0.23 ton of plutonium. There are different isotopes of plutonium, and that's very important. You see, plutonium 239 is the stuff we make nuclear weapons out of. And you might say, no, you mean, you make weapons-grade plutonium in a nuclear reactor? Well, you make a little bit of that isotope, but you also make the other isotopes. So, if you just distill the plutonium out from the uranium with chemistry, because they're different elements, and try to make a bomb out it, it would not work. You'd have to do isotopic separation, you have to have those centrifuges. And if you can do the isotopic separation, if you can do the enrichments, then you don't need plutonium right? You could just separate out the U235 and make a bomb. So the gating technology is not the raw material in this form, it's getting the fissile stuff, the uranium 235 or the plutonium 239. So this is a mix of different plutoniums. There of course is the stuff a little bit heavier, that's just a different isotope. We get 0.12 tons of uranium 236. Basically you add a neutron to the 235 and it doesn't split, doesn't fission, it just sits there. We got a new isotope of uranium, pretty useless, but it's there. Beyond plutonium, there's a radioactive element, actually, in between uranium and plutonium, called neptunium, obviously they went along the outer planets when they were creating those names. And, there's very, very small amounts of the higher elements, the Americium and the Curium itself, okay? So small amounts of these transuranics, things heavier than uranium. This is what's left in a reactor and this is the high-level wastes. Not the uranium 238, not the uranium 235, those are your fuels. Or maybe even the uranium 236, but generally, this stuff here is your high-level nuclear waste. It's all still contained in the fuel rod. Actually, it's even more contained than that, it's in a fuel pellet, which is in a fuel pin. The fuel pin is in a fuel rod. There are two different types of the high level wastes. The relatively short lived fission products, they may decay in tens to hundreds of years. And the very long lived transuranic elements, things heavier than uranium, which may take tens of thousands of years to finally decay. So those are the wastes, what do we do with them? Well the first thing we do with them is you take them out of the reactor, highly radioactive. You do it with a crane and you take the fuel rod and you put it in a swimming pool. This may seem odd, nice pretty blue swimming pool, but it makes a huge amount of sense. First, as these radioactive elements change into other things, they decay, they give off some heat, the alphas, the betas, the gammas. And a pool of water is very good at taking that heat away. It just works by convection, the hot water rises, they cool it, put colder water back in, some circulation pump, sort of like a swimming pool. The other thing is that the alphas, betas and gammas that are given off, are shielded by the water. You got the workers here, they're pretty far away, right? They all have got their radiation badges, but once this fuel rod goes back under water, there's not going to be any dose to the people walking around the pool. And they will sit there in a pool like this. Here's a nice diagram that shows the convection currents and so forth, for maybe a few years, until the radioactivity that's in these, especially the short waved radio activity that would therefore be making the most heat has died away to a level where you would not have to store it in water anymore. The fuel rod will just heat exchange with the air that's around it and not be in any danger in getting so hot that it could melt. Here's where you could do reprocessing. You could take this, separate out the fission products from the transuranics. Take out all that uranium, the U238, the U235, use it again and just bury the fission products. Or if you think reprocessing might be either too dangerous or too time consuming or too costly, and you have plenty of uranium 235, you could just take the entire fuel rod and put it in some type of container. This would be a typical container. You make a very strong case. You keep it cushioned for any type of crushing. You put this inside. You've got shielding on the top and bottom. You've got bump protection and you make a safe container to have your nuclear wastes in. The plan was always to then transport this some place and we'll talk about transport in the next segment, transport it someplace and put it away where it's really safe, all right. So take the cask we just had and maybe fill in all the extra area inside with grout. What's grout? Well, it's cement without the water. So, if someday, tens of thousands of years from now, a tiny little bit of water gets in there, boom, it turns the concrete into rock. Doesn't have a liquid trying to leach away the radioactive materials that might somehow get through all the layers of protection. Then you would take this canister and stick it in holes in the ground in solid rock. And you would pick this place that has the solid rock that is 1000 feet below the surface and another 1000 feet above the water table, in a desert mountain, like this desert mountain. This is Yucca Mountain in Nevada. It's geologically stable. Nobody lives there. It's in a desert. You could put the waste there and be rest assured, it would just sit there virtually for eternity. Now, a lot of people, particularly those in Nevada said, hey, you know what? Why put the whole country's waste in our mountain? Put it in your mountain. Of course you're in a fertile, wet state like Illinois, say we don't have any mountains. But, nonetheless, there were objections. It's a little bit disingenuous, because just beyond here, just beyond Yucca Mountain, on the border of this site, is the US Government's nuclear weapons test site. Places that for dozens of years, they took nuclear bombs, buried them underground, and blew them up to learn what would happen. If the bomb works, what kind of effects were happening, and so forth. There was no containment around it except being buried in the dirt and all of that nuclear waste is still just sitting there, not in these beautiful canisters, not in the solid rock containers, not geologically monitored. Nonetheless, this was supposed to be the high-level waste repository. Well it's expensive, but most important, it's probably not needed because there's another way to do this. We have it in these safe containers and we have nuclear power plants, around 100 of them across the country. So why not, after you take it out of the pool, put it in the very safe dry cask, because you're not in the water pool anymore, right? Put it in the dry cask and now store it there next to the reactor, like this. Dry cask storage. And you might say, my God, what are those guys doing next to it? Well, there's enough shielding that you can stand next to it. You can monitor the radioactivity. These things are so heavy, no helicopter is going to come and pick them up. The helicopter doesn't exist that could do that. And I think it's bolted or concreted to the ground anyway. And you have these dry casks. Will these things geologically last for thousands of years? Perhaps not, but you can tell where they are, you know where they are. They start crumbling at some far, future time, you put them in a new cask, or maybe you even use the stuff that's inside. because remember, at least in the US, we don't reprocess. So you still have valuable fuel and valuable isotopes contained within these. Maybe you don't want to stick it way down deep in a mountain where it's very difficult to get. This is the future of high level waste. And the beauty of it is there's very little. All of the high level waste made in the United States nuclear power is still at the power plants. We've been making nuclear power, commercial nuclear power, my entire life. Was born in 58, and that's when the first commercial nuclear power plant went online. So all of this waste, now some amounts have been shipped and put at other facilities, but generally all of this waste is still at the power plants where it was made. because the amount that's made each year, this ton or so, is not a whole lot of volume compared to all the other waste systems we have in the United States. Worrying about the small amount of high level nuclear waste is probably not the smartest thing to do. First, it's dry, it's not radioactive goo. Secondly, you know exactly where it is, and you can measure how radioactive or therefore how dangerous it is. And third, you can put it in very safe containers. That's what you need to know about high level waste. In our next segment, we'll tell you how safe those containers really are. [MUSIC]
