After over 30 years in the nuclear (government) industry, I would say we never met an engineering challenge we couldn't solve, but had a very poor record of overcoming political challenges.
IMHO i think this is not very surprising given the extreme political implications of nuclear weapons. Nuclear power has always and will always play second fiddle to nuclear weapons.
@@brodude7194 as in the politicians won't give you unlimited funding until you hopefully maybe figure out if you can extract useful power from it in useful amounts?
FULL DISCLOSURE: My undergrad degree is in Nuclear Engineering, I am a retired Naval Officer (submarines, nuclear weapons) and a retired Radiation Health Physicist, who worked for 25 years with the Washington Office of Radiation Protection. I admit to having opinions on this topic. First, this was very well done. I believe that it captured the general situation, though there are a couple of points that I think you and your viewers might find interesting: 1. When fuel is reprocessed, not only the U235, but also the plutonium is usable as fissile material in new few. The plutonium was the excuse used to shut down the U.S. reprocessing efforts, but it really isn't very good for making nuclear weapons with. Basically, if you want "weapons grade" plutonium, you want to "cook" the fuel for a short time; days or weeks, depending on things. When fuel is in the reactor for years, the plutonium will have too much of the wrong isotopes. So, when you get down to it, our reprocessing program was shut down because of several lies. 2. With radioactive material, the half-life and how radioactive it is per number of atoms, or by weight, are linked. The shorter the half-life, the more radioactive it is. Fresh nuclear fuel, that hasn't been in a reactor, isn't radioactive enough to need special handling (though it is handled carefully, because it is REALLY expensive, and you wouldn't believe the amount of paperwork if you dent it). Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) is VERY radioactive, but the radioactivity start dropping as soon as the reactor is turned off. After about 10-30 years it is not hot enough to damage the fuel rods. After about 100 years it isn't very radioactive, anymore. After about 300 it is about as radioactive as when it went into the reactor. This is because the most radioactive fission fragments have short half-lives, and as those atoms decay, they aren't replaced, and eventually decay into stable atoms. So much of the problem with storing SNF is overstated, especially how long it needs to be stored. 3. Depending on a variety of factors, SNF can be used to make more energy without reprocessing it. The easiest way is with a Heavy Water Reactor, along the lines of the Canadian CANDU reactors. Overall, a good job.
@@johnwright6706 Any radioactive garbage that is generated. There is a lot more than just fuel. Even protective clothing needs to be properly disposed. As my understanding those radioactive byproducts are far more problematic then the actual fuel. And the danger they pose is greatly underestimated.
Well, water was pretty important first... then fire came along to be pretty important too... makes sense that in combination they're pretty awesome. Simple. But awesome.
@quiladog9302 a week without fire would mean no use of most human technology because we use fire for powering cars, electricity, building alloys and so many other things. Water and fire are fundamental parts of humanity.
After 6 years as a nuclear operator in the Navy, I spent 7 years working in nuclear waste disposal. This wasn't spent fuel, but mostly contaminated water and filtration media. By the time I quit the industry, the regulatory environment was incredibly hostile. It was as though the government was punishing the nuclear industry for existing. If you want to use the technology discussed here, you must first get government to work with you, not against you. We will always have radioactive wastes other than spent fuel. Therefore, we will have to find new ways to deal with this as well as the spent fuel.
Definitely need to get the government with us. Engineering can solve the problems. There are other options for energy too such as drilling down about two miles pumping water down to create steam in an almost unlimited supply of steam turbine energy. Government officials just can’t fathom technical problems and solutions. They think nuclear waste is the morning after eating atomic wings……
Says a lot about government. Bureaucrats are by nature cautious and overzealous. This also suits left-wing politicians who by their nature want to control the population.
Tbh if you’re in the navy, you are the government. It sounds like the solution is more educated regulation which will now be significantly harder after the abolition of the chevron doctrine.
@@Idealist_Metaphor I think we just need the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House to pick up the topic, bring in experts and consultants, decide on a direction and propose the changes. I looked up some info from their site and looks like they were talking about storage and recycling of fuel in April 2024, saying they are developing their policies to support the new advanced reactors that recycle the fuel.
Very well made, pretty impressive.... INCREADIBLY infuriating! I'm 35 years old and for at least 20 years I've been going on about how nuclear energy is NOT what people seem to think it is. All across the political spectrum people disagreed with me - though, to be honest, the farther left you went, the more disagreement I encountert. Now suddenly, after completely stopping all progress for decades people are suddenly coming around to the idea.... Well guess what: too little, too late! Germany has shut down all it's nuclear reactors. Other countries have not upgraded their reactors in decades, because the general consensus has been that nuclear energy is bad and should not be advanced. And to all the people saying that this is about recycling: yes, but as shown in the video, recycling into the existing nuclear plants!! Doesn't work for countries that don't have them anymore because of decades of ridiculous, uninformed fear mongering! Honestly, every single person who's ever been against nuclear energy should a) give themselves a pat on the back for accelerating climate change and b) shut up.
However, I'm afraid, that still she managed to omit one quite crucial fact: Starting composition of the fuel rods. I mean, there is only 3-5% of "active" Uranium-235 to begin with… Basically, "nuclear waste" is fuel rod with ~5% depletion, so the recycling process can go around for quite a long time… It should have been mentioned…
Hi Cleo, I’m a retired NASA Engineer, but before I joined the space industry with NASA (and Fairchild and Orbital Sciences and a load of other companies), I worked for a company called Vitro where we designed nuclear power plant safety systems. I designed the “Compensation Module” as well as other subsystems that were part of the Anticipatory Reactor Trip System (ARTS). I love what you did in this video and hope you keep it going. Take care, Tom KC3QAC
@@mrtimjitsu stfu Kyle, he's establishing that he can say with professional authority that they did a great job, not tooting his own horn or insulting her work! Skip off back to victimland and shhhh!
@@mrtimjitsu don’t be to envious. Just because you haven’t achieved anything to hang your hat on. Thomas has been on the cutting edge of research where you just join the keyboard mafia group trying to pick apart people better then you for no reason.
Nuclear Engineer here, i'm so happy to see these debunking videos now. You did a great job at making sense of the nuclear waste that oil and gas lobbyists have pushed onto the global energy industry. We all got shafted out of clean energy for fossil fuels, but that's now quickly changing for the better
@@budwilliams7908 huh last time i checked grown ups take responsibility for the consequences of the actions they advocate. If it's safe it's safe if not you don't just get to pass the buck
@@SunShine-xc6dh yes, actually, one garbage dump , the size of one regular garbage dump, is all you'd need to storage the waste. It's an incredulously small amount of waste. Less space than a solar farm.
AEC developwed Thorium reactors back in WW2 era, it was competing with radium/uranium based reactors. Thorium couldn't be used for weapons so most research was dropped. There are some countries (Canada and China?) working on them to come to fruition. Thorium reactors work like Uranium based reactors as a 'boiler' in power plants. One good thing is thorium reactors can 'eat' a little plutonium in its feed stock, as well as a little U23x. I would love to see you and Johnny do a documentary/series on the 'forgotten Thorium reactors'. BTW, Oakridge Labs ran a Thorium reactor 5 days a week for many years before shutting it down. Yes, they could 'turn it on' on Monday morning and 'off' on Friday night! You gotta check it out!
Thank you for bringing Thorium into the comments. Someday soon the rest of the world will be using Thorium and the US will be playing catch up. Knuckleheads!
Thorium molten salt reactors can also use the waste from uranium reactors for fuel and get 200 times more energy per kilogram of fuel comparing to uranium reactors, and by using it in thorium reactor will shorten waste storage time to few hundred of years.
@@cameronmccoy5051 That's right mate. But unfortunately BIG Greed will not let it happen. Thorium reactors would make electricity way too cheap and they will not tolerate it.
I came to say the same thing. Thorium is the other nuclear rabbbit hole that Cleo doesn’t touch on here in this video. Thorium seems to be the best long term energy solution yet it’s a pariah among regulators.
I've spent over 50 years working with various types of nuclear facilities, including spending a lot of time at the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant during its construction, and I am very impressed at how you simplified complex topics so that anyone can understand them.
Is there any credible source that clearly states waste in Rokkasho because of reprocessing is significantly reduced in radiation level which brings the time down to 200 years + instead of thousands- millions of years? Can't find any source about that.
@@rickkdev - the analysis is relatively simple. The long half-life materials, such as Pu and 235U, are removed from the waste to be used as fuel. The waste that's left is the very highly radioactive but shorter half-life materials.
@@lamontcranston3177 That was idiocricy of "professionals" who brake the written safety policies. Do you know in Russia there are an old "chernobyl specific" nuclear power plant that is still eunning without any issue? Have you ever fly on a plane while there were many aviation disasters around the world? So annoying while dumb personals living by hysteria and try to hysterize others.
So what is the catch? It sounds too good to be true and probably it is. She is not talking about the costs. These are probably enormous, since if not, the european countries, like Germany, that are currently investing billions and will do so for decades to find a way to store their waste "savely" somewhere underground, could just pay these billions to Japan and hand over their waste. Why the hell is Japan not offering such a deal? The will not only get "free fuel" for their "recycling plants" but even billions of Euros on top of it.
@M La because you have people who love to fearmonger as soon as they hear the nuclear word and try and stop good progress in its tracks. As soon as misinformed and disingenuous lobby groups hear about such a proposal, they will try to destroy that politicians career - again only from the unfactual fearmongering that always crops up when the nuclear word is mentioned
Cleo - that was a great summary - one point to add is the plutonium can be used in a mixed oxide fuel (MOX) so it is also recycled, but the supply chain needs to be tightly monitored to prevent nuclear proliferation risks, thanks Bruce.
That actually depends on the kind of recycling process being used. The PUREX process can separate plutonium from uranium and may need tighter monitoring, though you cannot really get high quality (weapons-grade) plutonium from the recycling high-burnup spent fuel. However, if you use pyroprocessing as the recycling method, as described in the video, the plutonium and the uranium cannot become separated, so it is never a proliferation concern. By simply checking the kind of facility you can already ensure that there is no chance of proliferation.
I started my career in nuclear power at the Naval Reactors Facility, where we actually took the spent fuel from the Naval reactors from our nuclear navy. The fuel would be sent 10 miles down the road to the chem lab, where it was processed and sent to a fuel facility to be reused. These facilities were shut down in the 1990’s. As you can see we had a working system of what you suggested. We also had a working reactor that would work as a normal reactor but when it was shut down would actually produce more fuel than was in the original startup(Breeder Reactor)
So it worked super well with no disadvantages significant enough to mention them here which is why it was shut down... Of course they shut it down, who doesn't shut down expensive projects that work perfectly? It's not like there were additional problems or reasons why, pfff
" We also had a working reactor that would work as a normal reactor but when it was shut down would actually produce more fuel than was in the original startup(Breeder Reactor)" The Shippingport Experiment? There was a small amount more fissionable material than when it started. Like three percent more. Since it was blanket material it was not really fissionable. Getting the blanket geometry right was tough, the Shippingport reactor was not intended as a breeder reactor.
This stuck with me when said by a former professor years ago (he was a nuclear engineer for the Navy before teaching): "If it's still radioactive it's still fuel!" We're sticking these fuel rods into storage not because they're waste but because we don't want to reprocess them to continue using them due to misguided fears of nuke proliferation.
@@gluttonousmachina2961 Commercial nuclear reprocessing doesn't need 100 years r&d. There have been plenty of commercial plants in real operation that do exactly this - e.g. Sellafield in the UK was doing it 1952 to 2022. The issues are lack of political will, public fear and poor economics when there are other cheap sources of reliable energy (e.g. gas). Real shame we've wasted decades.
@@gluttonousmachina2961 *sigh* fears about ionizing radiation are greatly overblown. Did you know you're being bathed in ionizing radiation _right now_? That's right - we're constantly exposed to a pretty hefty amount of ambient ionizing radiation from space. Our bodies evolved to handle that. In fact, lab tests suggest that organisms which *aren't* exposed to any ionizing radiation are less healthy... there have been a number of studies on lab mice and rats [shielding a group of them against ambient radiation, then comparing them against a non-shielded control group] which suggest that radiation hormesis (a positive health effect from exposure to ambient ionizing radiation) is actually real. So, while I wouldn't go munching on a bunch of radioactive waste, we also don't have to worry about a little radiation here and there. The Linear No-Threshold model radiation scaremongers like to use has been disproven. FWIW PM2.5, a component of fossil fuel pollution, kills more people every few days than every nuclear accident in history COMBINED. Heart disease, cancer, strokes, etc... they're all among the most common causes of death, and fossil fuel pollution causes them in many (perhaps even most) cases. Worry about that. For what it's worth, fossil fuel pollution kills more than people every year as died in the Holocaust. Fossil fuels are mass murder. Switching to nuclear power would save millions of lives every single year.
@@gluttonousmachina2961 The same one that peaked in the 70's and has since improved waste treatment facilities, which convert much of this radioactive waste into a solid for long-term storage.
@@gluttonousmachina2961 "We do it because we CAN NOT reprocess them. Might be able to, maybe ... in 100 years after pouring billions into research and development." is the US 100 years behind the rest of the world?
The summaries at the end of Huge If True always hit me in the feels. It's the kind of inspiration we need to move forward together instead of hiding alone in fear.
@@skataskatata9236 Storage costs are not exactly prohibitive but have to be included while doing the sums. I still would like to see fast burner reactors neing built to get rid of residual high level leftovers.
My father was a nuclear physicist for Sandia labs. He and I would talk about his work as much security would allow and one of the topic I distinctly recall was using nuclear waste to generate electricity rather than storing it at WIPP. He saw it as a “waste” of energy and I often questioned him about it. I believe today that it would be in our best interest to use this energy rather than store it. I forgot about these conversations until your segment. Thank you. Wouldn’t be great to get this idea back on track today!
As a former US Navy nuclear power engineer, who is now the father of three boys, I have a very difficult time sometimes explaining high-level physics in ways that they will understand. You do a spectacular job of explaining complex ideas in easy to understand ways that my kids love. Thanks for putting this channel on.
If you understand your subject matter, it is very easy to explain. Sort of like you referring to High Energy Physics as high-level physics. Are they running for office? What passes for knowledge these days is a lot. There are 5 known physical forces in the universe, start there. Nuclear is 3 on the list. 2nd is the bond holding cells together, and it has a name. Look it up. Nuclear is the only one that can eliminate life on earth, and most likely will due to greed and poor education. Being smart enough to 'do not touch' is not taught. We are so stupid. Gravity is number one and we don't use it to control anything; nor do we use the energy potential. Do the math on Gravity and Nuclear becomes a drop in the bucket in terms of potential energy. We are playing around with the most dangerous force imaginable without even understanding it, while safe alternatives are under all around us. Engineers don't consider conservation anymore I guess. We sleep through Ethics.
As someone who has studied the nuclear fuel cycle in school, I love how simple this is and how well explained this is for a general audience. Well done. Looking forward to seeing what other great videos you produce
@@MelbourneMeMe lol I only have a minor in Nuclear Engineering so like... Not an expert but also much more familiar than most people. My bachelors is in Mechanical Engineering.
@@MelbourneMeMe Don't be so hard on him. Most people study things in school. I did womens studies. A lot of it. You could say that it was 'hard' work but I went very 'deep' in the subject(s) and graduating felt orgasmic! 😏
Yeah, basic errors in this video. At about 6:15 says U-235 has 235 neutrons in 'atom' when it's really 235 *nucleons* in nucleus. More importantly, reprocessing is not 'recycling', as it still leaves all the long- and short-lived fission products. It is a common process in Europe at least, and is used to recover plutonium for bombs anyway.
As someone whose PhD research is on corrosion mitigation in molten salt for pyroprocessing viability, it's absolutely DELIGHTFUL to see this information being distributed to the world. I love seeing someone (almost) as excited as me about the future of used fuel recycling!
And what about all the waste that is NOT the fuel? How do we store THAT for 100, 000 years? And what about accidents like Japan, Russia, and potentially Ukraine? Last I heard 1 gram of plutonium was enough to kill every living thing on Earth. Has that changed?
@@randomgrinn In Johnny Harris' video Cleo explains how fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas kill (associated deaths to workers and people in all related disasters) significantly more people than nuclear energy in relation to the amount of energy they produce. Also another comment mentions Thorium reactors that use a thorium-plutonium fuel mixture. I don't know much about this method, but it seems to be a a solution to your other concern.
@@randomgrinn That's the thing though, we don't have to store it for hundreds of thousands of years, "merely" several centuries, which is far more manageable. Most what can't be reused, apart from the excess U238 which is both only very lightly radioactive and naturally occurring, has much lower half-life and is less radioactive as there are less of them that produce high amounts of gamma radiation, instead producing low amounts of alpha (helium cores) or beta (electrons and/or positrons) radiation, which can't reach far and would thus be much safer to handle in a casket. As for the accidents, they are due to two things: Old, unsafe designs and using water as coolant. The old design of the power plants meant that there weren't enough failsafes and redundancies (and in case of Fukushima, putting the generator on ground level in a zone where there could a tsunami potentially knock it out; more modern designs put the generator higher up specifically to avoid it being knocked out by flooding), and using water as coolant always carries the risks of steam (and thus pressure) buildup and hydrogen generation (which can explode quite spectacularly). Future design in development use either some gas (most likely Helium, potentially Argon if there's a shortage of the former as they are very stable and non-reactive) and runs the generator at ~900°C (1650°F), which is much more efficient, or molten salt or lead, which also run a t higher temperatures and would solidify and safely bury the fuel in case of any breach. Nuclear energy is not inherently unsafe and unsustainable, it's just using the technologies from the 70's (of which most reactors in the world are still based upon) that is unsafe. Those should gradually be replaced with newer, much safer designs and reactors that allow for either a closed cycles and/or a Thorium cycle.
I was trained to deal with radioactive material while in the military (part of my job) and we learned that most of the nuclear “waste” being buried was actually recyclable but that the regulations governing this were established 60+ years ago and never really undergo alteration. We need to be smarter as a society but we are too often directed by the extremes of each side of the argument.
The video really is good propaganda. Existing Tech - no ... Trow in the nuclear trash in it - noo.... Its just a regulatory issue - noooooooo...... The whole topic is so much more complex!
@@muten861 it really isn't propaganda, or you would have to label every essay about something as propaganda. The core of this video is that there is a possibility for fixing a problem and that we are not even able to discuss this because of the political climate.
@@muten861 The topic is complex, but the reason it is not discussed is the "propaganda" that has been sold to the public for the last 60 years. This should be an engineering challenge and not a political football.
@@1962Jocko thats the basic missconception on that video: it is not only the politics who makes some issues, with this tech, there is are major technology issues which must be solved.
The Left in the US had a lot of political power and celebrities like Jackson Browne opposing nuclear. By using scare tactics, they got Carter to ban it, despite Carter having the nuclear background! Although Reagan overturned it, the damage was already done. Think of the greenhouse gas emission that could have been saved if Democrats hadn't fought nuclear so hard.
PREACH sister! As a chemical engineer it annoys me to no end that PR failures and public idiocy have led to the downfall of one of the most useful energy resources available. If we had spent the past 5-6 decades perfecting nuclear reactors instead of legislating them into the ground we would be in SUCH a better place today in terms of LCOE (levelized cost of electricity) and emissions.
I wonder how much the popular media had to do with it. From the late 50s into the 60s it seemed that all the science fiction films, which were popular at the time, always showed us that anything nuclear did nothing but create over sized monsters. With the connection between government and social media I also wonder how much government had to do with that.
Your failures. Nuclear is the most unreliable power source ever invented, as it goes down for MONTHS at a time for refueling and maintenance. Since you're a chemical engineer, were kids in Flint poised by lead because it was radioactive, or because it was a toxic heavy metal? Kids born in Serbia, much less Iraq, are subjected to hideous birth defects by depleted uranium munitions. Your nuclear waste will be a hazard until the sun goes nova.
That's not exactly what's happened. Any systems scientist can demonstrate why nuclear is inferior to natural gas in throughput, and nuclear isn't bootstrapped; it's a hydrocarbon derivative much like hydrogen. Its entire energy input is already a much simpler fuel that can be used on demand with a faster production and lower unit cost. Electricity is already cheap and abundant. Jevons paradox combined with market forces would only make for a product with no market value and would rapidly increase overall consumption. Declining EROEI.
Whole heartedly agree. The so called nuclear waste has a lot of very useful stuff in it. One no brainer use of it is using the cesium to make portable water purifiers where chemical means are not reliable. Several kilocuries of 137Cs as glass in a titanium or stainless tube wrapped in a copper coil of copper or stainless steel tubing would make literal pond scum into drinkable water, 24-7 365 for 75 years straight. 🤔
@@skeetorkiftwon Depends on where you're from. Electricity isn't cheap everywhere. Talking about Europe, it became quite expensive after NordStream blew up. We might've benefited from such projects, and we _were_ supposed to have nuclear plants ready for this process by 2022... but the project got canceled in a deal between the leading party and the ecologist. Freaking politics...
You are a deluded sucker. She is talking about breeder reactor technology. Where side reactions form higher and higher mass synthetic actinides with smaller and smaller critical masses and larger releases of neutrons with every fission that transmute the Atoms of the reactor structure and body's of the workers into radionuclides. EVERY TIME YOU "BURN YOUR NUCLEAR WASTE".! It has NEVER been viable because predicting the chemistry and characteristics of the fuel in controlled fission becomes more and more impossible with every cycle. It has always resulted in unexpected uncontrolled sudden explosive chain reactions. NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS WITH UNCONTROLLED ENVIRONMENTAL RELEASE OF LARGE QUANTITIES OF HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL AT "WASTE REPROCESSING FACILITIES" IN THE US OF As, France or Britain HAVE BEEN COMMON. AND ALMOST INVARIABLY COVERED UP FROM PUBLIC AWARENESS! -They only ever reprocessed spent fuel for weapons grade plutonium anyway. And the fission fragments are more and more dangerous at every repetition of the cycle. The only advantage, if you could call it that is the potential to accumulate certain isotopes of Americium Californium and Curium that have critical masses from pinhead to marble sized and in theory could be used for nuclear fission bombs you could put in your pocket. As long as you intend to use them in less than a month, and don't mind being killed by the neutrons they release from spontaneous fissions, if you spend more than a few minutes anywhere near them. As the half lives are a few years, spontaneous fissions thousands of times more per second than U235 or Pu239.. If you think using nuclear fuel as radioactive as polonium 210, where an amount the size of a grain of salt is sufficient to kill by radiation poisoning every human on the planet, then you are as much of an ignorant fool as THIS SCIENTIFICALLY ILLITERATE BIMBO appears to be in this video.
How thrilling! Another pretty girl with a pleasant voice talking about things that interests the millions of sex starved nerds on TH-cam made it... Id say a modicum of success is pretty much guaranteed.
@@1112viggo Wow what a cynical attitude. You are not acknowledging reality, if you think anything will be achieved without natural gifts. And if it is not looks then it will be anything else. I would say these videos are also great in many other ways other than her looks, by the way. And yes she is tremendously beautiful, but should she now lock herself away because of that, or create great content because she likes to have a life? I would guess someone who posts a comment like that probably prides himself with his intelligence. Thats a blessing that is distributed unequally and by chance aswell. And you might also want to consider that it is a very cheap shot to reduce a womans accomplishments only to her looks. Furthermore I think it can be considered the male counterpart to females attributing male success only to them having advantages in "the patriarchy". Both seems much too cynical.
@@flosse1993 You are misinterpreting my lack of excitement and surprise as disapproval. What ever attracts people to a video about science is a thing good in my book. Personally i am more thrilled by someone like Sabine Hossenfelder making it big. She is for me the incarnation of no nonsense science and she actually got the age and credentials to contribute to the science, rather than simply explaining it.
@@1112viggo Well it does sound quite unfair and I'm not sure that view depends on interpretation all that much. But your second message sounds like a much fairer opinion and makes much sense. But also I would say: if her sources are solid and the resulting information is solid I think I prefer someone who is capable of conveying information skillfully and in a way that captures my attention over some amazing scientist who doesn't know how to explain anything (Had that experience in Uni alot) As for the example you give, I can't speak to that, but of course someone who is great in their field AND comunicates great is the pinnacle and maybe deserves more attention and praise
Love your work Cleo , from an environmental engineering student.Sending eco love all the way from Tamilnadu, Chennai , India . Just so u know , India reprocesses almost all of its spent nuclear fuel (to save on imports but , its eco friendly 2! ) but anyways, we’re not stereotypical about nuclear energy like the so called “developed & educated nations “bcoz of an accident that happened decades ago (yes , I’m talking to u Germany ) . Stop lingering on the past and work towards the future . There are safer and promising nuclear solutions. Fun fact : worlds oldest & still operating nuclear plant is in India . Up to date on safety standards , alive & kickin.’ five decades of nuclear energy , not a single accident.
Love you from Bihar, India. Also, Is anyone doing advanced reactors in our country like MSRs , SMRs ? And what happened to the "Three stage thorium program" thing ?
Dude I'm also Indian and I want to work in nuclear energy (I'm 18 btw). Got 97%ile in jee mains :/ Advanced is next month. Anyways I'm looking for some guidance on how to enter the industry. Would it be better to do something like Electrical from BITS or environmental engineering from IISC Bangalore or Environmental from one of the top 7 IIT's. Which college did you go to and how did you end up working in nuclear power? Thanks for your time and Jai Hind brother :)
Germany is one of the worst example of trying to use more renewable energy. They are closing down nuclear power stations and now have to increase use of coal due to the war as they cannot keep up with energy demands with renewable energy. Politicians are all about nepotism and money unfortunately.
Just a small correction of the enrichment process: It's not about making the U238 become U235 in any way. We are mining the combination of U235 (a little) and U238 (a lot), we then slowly scrape the U238 away, therefore having better ratio of U235 vs U238, but we don't make more U235. The process how to do this (very high level) is to spin it in a centrifuge and since U238 is +-238/235 times heavier, it can be separated when spinning really fast.
(Singing) You spin me right 'round, baby, right 'round/Like a centrifuge, baby, right 'round, 'round, 'round/ You spin me right 'round, baby, right 'round/Like a centrifuge, baby, right 'round, 'round, 'round Also, it takes a lot of centrifuges to do this. I seem to remember the number 60 floating around for the Iran nuclear program, but I could be wrong. This is something that has to be done in large complexes. So, if you're thinking of enriching Uranium to make a bomb, you're not going to do this in your back yard.
7:08 The 235 part of Uranium-235 isn't the number of neutrons, its the number of nucleons. Uranium is element 92, so it has 92 protons which balances 92 electrons.. in order for all those protons to populate the tiny nucleus it requires neutrons to bind it all together. In isotope 235, there are 235 - 92, or *143 neutrons.*
But does this error take away from the message she is trying to get across? I get wanting to correct someone on making a mistake, but please think about the impact your correction is making. People might see your correction and totally dismiss the message she is trying to get across. So if her mistake is fundamentally invalidating her message please explain that with your correction. If it doesn't then make sure you point that out in your correction by saying something like "Great video, I'm glad you're getting this info out but here is a correction to something you said in the video..." Many people will come to the comments on controversial topics like this to see if there might be any glaring problems with the message that's being put forth and it sucks when a topic is unfairly invalidated by someone who just wants to point out a small issue with the video. Sometimes were just better off not saying anything if we don't want to take the time to explain ourselves.
@@mute8s The error doesn't take away but it's important to point it out. Despite being a huge fan of Cleo, the mistake made me skeptical about everything I was being presented with since it's basic knowledge within the subject.
@mute8s, Relax. If an argument can't stand minimal criticism, it wasn't a very good argument. And it's better to know the truth even if it's uncomfortable. That being said, this is mostly a pedantic discussion. The video is correct that the number refers to how many neutrons are in the atom. It might be MORE accurate to say it IS the number of nucleons (the number of protons + neutrons). But it's also true that the number identifies the ISOTOPE, which is what we are concerned about here and the isotope is COMPLETELY determined by the number of neutrons. So, the isotope is what matters regarding the number and the isotope is entirely determined by the number of neutrons. The ONLY reason the number of nucleons matters is because the number of neutrons in that nucleon is changing between isotopes. The number of protons is what makes it uranium. It's no longer uranium if the number of protons changes. So, we can be certain the number of protons is NOT changing and thus the number identifies how many neutrons are in the atom because the other half of the nucleon NEVER changes. So, basically she's right. The number identifies the isotope which is determined ENTIRELY by the number of neutrons in the atom.
As always great video but I just wanted to point out a minor mistake at 7:09 : The number 235 refers to the number of nucleons (neutrons + protons) in the isotope, nut just the number of neutrons. Also uranium is an element rather than a rock.
Hey, thanks for pointing this out! I added a correction that should appear at that timestamp. Here it is too: Correction: 07:09 The number refers to the total number of nucleons (either a proton or a neutron) in the atom, not the neutrons alone. A U-235 atom contains 92 protons and 143 neutrons (an atomic mass of 235). The U-238 atom also has 92 protons but has 146 neutrons (an atomic mass of 238). I should have said these *differ* by the number of neutrons in the atom. Thanks to the commenters who pointed this out! Really appreciate it :)
The way I remember this is carbon-12. It has an atomic weight of exactly 12 (by definition of atomic weight), which makes no sense if it has 12 neutrons.
Subscribed. I have been saying this had to be possible for decades because “if it’s still radioactive, it still has energy”, all without knowing it already existed.
Hi! I'm a nuclear engineer and did my PhD research on nuclear waste recycling. I am so happy about this video! You did an amazing job explaining the nuclear fuel cycle, the history of why we don't reprocess today, and that touch of hope about how things might change. Let's hope more people get behind nuclear as a source of clean energy and as part of the solution to climate change, but only if it is deployed and distributed in an equitable and just way!
Odd. My father in law was head of atomic energy.... Worked for major firms dealing with cleaning up used nuclear fuel.... At NO POINT does he see this being viable. He has grandchildren and is very environmentally aware.... Why does he not see what this video says is so simply there ?
Maybe I'm to stupid to get this but where in this video was there any in detail explanation how this is supposed to work? It was shown that the nuclear waste can be recycled ... nothing new to this at all, especially if one does nothing more than to build the same type of pellets again and again. (MOX Pellets containing quite a substantial amount of Plutonium) The "magic" that needs happening here is the different type of reactors and there was thundering silence to this in this yt-video. Just some spokespersons from a company trying to commercialise a new typ of reactors ...
My dad told me about this as a child. My uncle has worked at a similar plant working on recycling waste my whole life. It's so frustrating that the mass perception of something seems to be the main barrier to a bountiful resource. The sceptic in me wants to think that fossil fuel companies are in cahoots with the press to downplay this sort of technology so that their product is more valuable.
The skeptic in you is right, except its not so much the much maligned fossil fuel companies, as the "green" energy ones, along with China, the largest manufacturer green energy products, like solar panels. Of course, the press has a lot of genuine patsy true believers though, so not really technically "in cahoots"
I first heard of this over 20 years ago from a guest speaker when I was a college student. I have been an advocate of doing this ever since. It disgusts me the way this industry has been demonized by certain segments of our society. This demonization has been uncalled for and has unnecessarily scared the public.
its the media machine. they probably dont even have anything against nuclear power, or recycled nuclear; they just know they will profit from doing everything they can to make it look evil.. the fact is, even normal nuclear could be a reasonable and significantly better option for us for a significant time, its not as dangerous as everyone thinks it is, and when all the protocols are followed it probably on average safer than the entire coal energy chain.
Many of the problems are NIMBY, and probably the worst one was the rejection of the Yucca Mountain waste facility in the Nevada Desert - Death Valley. It might be one of the best places on earth to store the stuff in terms of safety/stability, and one of the lower population density areas on earth, other than the Australian Outback.
@@Francis-rs7zu Yes. It's not that it's been demonized by certain segments, it's that nobody wants to live near a nuclear plant. The "certain segments" never had that kind of influence. If they did, they'd have solved all kinds of environmental problems. They'd have shut down coal too.
@@YTEdy No one wants to live next to a chemical plant. No one wants to live next to a refinery. No one wants to live next to a freeway, and on and on. Communities that ARE next to a nuclear plant seldom have any issues with it. It's the hyped spreading of fear by design by never-nuclear groups that has been the problem.
@@YTEdy It would not hurt my feelings at all to live near a nuclear power plant. I think it would be awesome, especially if I could also live close to a hydropower plant.
Just so you know, what is being reported here is exactly what the nuclear industry wants you to hear. Nothing is incorrect, but it is completely missing the real issue. Yes, we have the technology to re-process nuclear waste, but the current technology is ungodly expensive. Very few people believe it will ever be able possible to recycle our current nuclear waste in a way that is at all cost effective. Only once we have exhausted all of the mines will there be much chance for recycling to be cost effective. Basically this video is a license to allow the nuclear industry to carry on doing exactly what it is currently doing. And for reference here, this is coming from a person who is overall pro-nuclear, but wants to see nuclear done in a responsible way.
Inspirational video! Hope we get the proper technology soon, not use we do this in Canada either! I have to go polish my nuclear knowledge, I thought Uranium was the very unstable atom that breaks down into stable atoms creating tons of energy and radiation, and over time when the supply of Uranium becomes smaller, the nuclear fuel doesn't create enough economical energy and has to be replaced, unless recycled.
All fission reactions are very dependent on density: what are the chances that a neutron thrown off from a split will hit another atom? Too dense, and you get too many cascading reactions, and everything melts down (or, in a bomb, explodes). The density is carefully planned in a fuel rod. Once enough of the fuel has split, the density is lowered to the point where the fuel is still hot, but not hot enough to run the reactor efficiently ... but there's still a lot of fuel left in the rod. Recycling is basically sifting out some of the stuff that is slowing down the reaction, and making a new rod that has the right density from what's left over.
This is close, but not quite how it works! The energy in a nuclear power plant isn’t from uranium decaying because it’s unstable, but because it gets hit by a neutron-and that decay also gives off neutrons, so you can get a chain reaction. This means you need enough U-235 that every U-235 reaction creates exactly one more-less than one and the power stops, more than one and you have a nuclear bomb. :/ Eventually, there’s not enough U-235 in the pellets to keep the number of subsequent reactions at one, and you need new fuel-but most of the U-235 is still in there, just with a bunch of other elements ‘getting in the way’. Get rid of those (see the video!) and you can carry on using the fuel. And repeat!
CANDU reactors can burn fuel very slightly longer than other reactors, but nowhere near as long as countries like France & Japan which reprocess nuclear waste. We did this so that we could use natural uranium instead of enriched uranium, but it involved "enriching" the water. Heavy water absorbs less neutrons. Burning fuel for longer is a nice byproduct.
It seems like every elementary school student has considered this concept- if nuclear waste is so dangerous, then why isn’t it still being used for energy output, only in greater quantities of waste matter..?
I assume it was an economist as you buy the rods from one supplier that also handles the pickup/transport and "disposal".. It's a monopoly because it has to be (nat. Sec./the Russians/terrorists). In essence as these spent fuel reactors exists we kinda have to assume that not all reactors are spent fuel capable and they're not just hauling spent fuel from plant to plant 🎉 Didn't Hillary sell the uranium to Russia not all that long ago? How much uranium is still being mined/processed every day? How many new reactors have been opened/built? It's not a fast growing market and that one company still needs to make a profit every year.. The rods don't spend a lot of time in the cooling pools spaced further apart or moderated because they lack the ability to boil water. In any case the Thorium reactors are far more elegant and basically can run forever, which is why they aren't used: there wouldn't be an expensive infrastructure needed to make money, it would just generate power safely and cheaply. And then offcourse they wouldn't provide weapons grade plutonium which if I remember correctly was the primary concern when starting up the first plant in the first place. The main product wasn't electricity back then, and the amount of nuclear weapons that could be decommissioned and their payloads converted to fuel would also make nuclear a prime candidate for net zero electric because no mining would be involved
The moment i found out about nuclear energy in elementary school, i was just obsessed with the idea of endless amounts of energy. I also realized people are more scared about Nukes instead of the actual process of creating energy with a reactor.
Just letting you know I subscribed. Retired Navy Nuclear Propulsion Plant supervisor on Submarines. We didn't invent radioactivity, there are radioactive rocks all over. We just mine them and concentrate the material to get critical mass. The waste problem is easily soluble, it just takes education
Edit: People keep commenting about the "feasibility" of this recycling process. It's obvious that those of you making this comment don't know anything about manufacturing. Unless you are making a custom-made-to-order item or something in too low volume to keep a factory producing it, manufacturing a product is almost always done at a loss when you start. Whether we are talking about fuel rods, game consoles, or GPUs, you typically will not make a profit on a unit of sale when you first launch the product. Let's take the PS5 Standard Edition for example. It was launched in November 2020 at a price of $499 USD. This was likely a price that resulted in a @40% loss at the time. Yes, that means each console likely cost Sony more than $800 USD to manufacture. Why, then, did they sell the console at a loss? Because Sony planned to make it for 5-10 years and the longer you constantly produce something in a factory the lower its manufacturing cost becomes until it eventually reaches the actual cost of the materials and labor which is always far less than the price of the item. Sony announced that the PS5 Standard Edition would break even in June 2021. After that point, Sony would make an overall profit with each unit of sale. Something to keep in mind is that Sony was probably producing the units for a good six months to a year before the launch to have enough inventory, meaning that it took nearly two years for that model to become profitable. This is true for nearly all products made via mass manufacturing and is called "process maturity". So, please, please, stop telling me how there's no profit to be made in this recycling process when recycling is just another manufacturing method. It's not immediately profitable, but it is over time. Big Business and Big Govt. rarely care about short-term profits when manufacturing something. Original Post: I remember arguing with a friend of mine over 20 years ago in HS that anything that was radioactive, including nuclear waste, could be used to generate power if we designed a plant to make use of it. Wish I had known about this place back then.
Anything radioactive, huh? How about the low level waste like a glove that has touched something radioactive and now has radioactive dust particles on it? Can you reuse that? I don't think so... the steps to separate the tiny amounts of usable fission material would require more energy than you'd get out of it. This kind of low level waste is a burden no matter what you do and it's not completely avoidable.
@@thulyblu5486 I love when people try to argue against one half of a sentence. The half you have tried to ignore is, "if we designed a plant to make use of it."
@@TheZoenGaming I didn't ignore that part. Is it feasible to design a plant to make use of such low level waste? ... I don't think so. That was the point. Disagree? Feel free to explain how that's remotely conceivable and file a patent for such a revolutionary design and expect a nobel prize in the future. Not even joking: environmental activists would love you for solving the nuclear waste problem like this.
@@thulyblu5486 The whole point of this video is that the "nuclear waste problem" was solved more than 60 years ago. As to whether it's "feasible", by what metric are you checking? Is it feasible commercially to design and build a plant which subsumes anything that emits ionic radiation? No, not right now. Is it feasible for our and the planet's health and safety to not do so despite the economic cost? No, and it never will be.
@@thulyblu5486 Your reply is the equivalent to "I have nipples, Greg. Can you milk me?" Nitpicking doesn't make you look intelligent. It makes you look like you're incapable of discerning an obvious generalization in a given statement. People used to be capable of having conversations with each other, without the need for "gotcha" moments. Those who insisted on doing such things were typically dismissed as obnoxious losers, who had nothing worthwhile in their lives - so they would need to get "wins" by splitting hairs. On second thought, I guess it's still the same, today. There are just a lot more of you, now.
This is such a fun community, not much toxicity or negativity but genuine questions, discussions, honest and humble opinions, more knowledge and appreciative comments are all. And most of it is about science - tech and it's use - misuse, effects and affects, an optimist - pragmatic take on all issues related. So happy to be here as a part!
Not much negativity? I think you mean not much *_dissent_* - because it's being censored from the discussion. I scrolled way down, and all I saw was an echo chamber of technophilia.
@@ericthompson3402 Ideas without dissent are ideas that have not been tested. Ideas that can withstand dissent are more likely to be true. That's actually the scientific method. 🙂
@@tim6405y I’ve heard of how recycling actually causes a lot more money than just throw them away and create new trash for the product. But the fact that remain is companies would list their products container“recyclable” just to have an excuse to create more trash, that’s where I came from for my comment.
This video is the nuclear industry trying to greenwash their forever toxic waste by claiming it can be recycled. It is very cynical. I'm sure your are for recycling :)
its mostly because of the fear of nuclear power in general. we should have way more than we do now but don't because of the plants that exploded due to human error and freak accidents. Not only that but Hollywood demonizes it so much. Windmills and other "green" energies still does some harm and we cant soley rely on them because its not at a constant.
What people fail to realize about nuclear waste, is that it’s radioactivity decreases exponentially over time. While it will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, it isn’t deadly/dangerous to humans for that entire period of time. After about 400 years it’s safe enough to hold for hours at a time without serious exposure. Still a long period in human terms, but a far cry from what most people think when they hear “100,000 years”
Here are some key takeaways: 1. There is a type of nuclear reactor, first built in 1962, that can generate electricity from nuclear waste. This suggests nuclear waste could be an energy resource rather than just radioactive trash needing storage. 2. There is enough nuclear waste in the US alone to power the country for the next 150 years if utilized, according to nuclear energy experts. Reusing the waste reduces radioactivity and storage needs. 3. Most nuclear waste today is stored in dry casks for decades. But the recycled waste only needs storage for hundreds of years instead of hundreds of thousands of years. 4. In 1977, President Carter banned reprocessing and recycling used fuel due to nuclear proliferation concerns. This entrenched light water reactors in the US. 5. Other countries like Japan continued reprocessing and recycling. The US ban was lifted in 1981 but economics favored the status quo. 6. Economics and access to cheap uranium diminished incentives to recycle. But with more focus on clean energy and supply chain issues, there is renewed interest. 7. If nuclear waste recycling can be commercialized, it would demonstrate the ability for humanity to overcome fears, change course, and use technology optimistically.
🎉 Is there renewed interest in thorium reactors? There was 13:54 no further development since the early 1960s because used fuel could not be used to make weapons.
Tell me, why if these highly dangerous substances can give free energy for hugh amount of people for 150 years, why isn't it used. And can you tell me how many years it is that these nice substanses could be released out into the nature?
@@niravapurv4578 I think the answer is in your question: because they are highly dangerous. What do you mean by "released out into nature"? If it's enriched and highly radioactive nuclear fuel then it's not safe for anyone in nature for several hundred years or even thousands depending on what exactly are you going to release.
I had a scout leader in the early nineties who was an active lobbyist for this exact topic and he explained it in detail to us young men. Having this information I decided to explain my new found knowledge to my dad who actually worked for Argonne at the Idaho national labs. He let me have my say but then proceeded to tell me that this was old news and what they were exited about was the nuclear reactor that they had just completed. The one which they could safely walk around the core. He told me that they demonstrated it to a group of officials and told them that it was impossible to melt down and they begged them not to try. It did not melt down. This was supposed to be the future of nuclear energy and they were willing to license and outsource the technology to the rest of the world. Yeah, and then the politicians got involved… again
oil companies got involved, because if it was just about politicians, then the reasonable ones would win eventually. but when you have people with too much power that would lose A LOT then you can be sure they will manipulate the playing field as much as they can so it doesn't happen. lobbying and fear mongering propaganda is the reason safe nuclear technologies are not more widespread, not democracy.
@@SunShine-xc6dh it does, through improper implementation of regulations. Nuclear is by far one of the safest forms of energy generation, and the absurd ever changing safety expectations the government imposes just make it prohibitively expensive, expectations that come into law through lobbing. those regulations are not there to make nuclear safer and properly implemented as regulations should, they are there so fossil fuels are more attractive to investors. oil, gas and coal are a LOT more dangerous for people living closer to it than nuclear, by a LARGE margin, and yet, it doesn't have not even a fraction of the regulations nuclear have, even though things like more efficient generators with better exhaust filtration and carbon capture technology could save millions of lives, we don't see any government forcing them to implement any of it.
It's so crushing to hear those optimistic old transmissions and see where we are now. Those people had so many dreams. I find my self thinking of what could have been, if not for some key individuals. This video almost felt like the optimist takes of the old days. Loved it. Thank you very much.
I remember being at school and seeing a video about the first nuclear power station to operate in our country, soon after it was switched on. We were told that nuclear power would generate electricity that would be so cheap there wouldn't be any point in metering it. Decades later we're sticking wind farms in the sea and covering acres of potentially productive land with solar panels - with no idea how to deal with them when they stop working in 20 years - when we could have had safe (yes!), reliable, cheap (but not free!) electricity from nuclear technology if Green scaremongers hadn't got to the politicians and frightened them into regulating the industry almost to death.
You'll likely miss this comment, but I felt so moved by this video to have to reach out. In the 3rd and 4th grade, I really enjoyed reading books on alloys and nuclear fission. Nuclear power always fascinated and excited me, but as I got older I started to learn about the dangers and tragedies surrounding it. Today, I have both a BA and MA in linguistics, but never stopped being interested in STEM, especially surrounding nuclear power, materials engineering, and organic chem. This video sparked that same joy I felt when reading my first book on nuclear fission in my elementary school library. Thank you for that! Subscribed :)
I worked on the construction of THORP (Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plan). Originally, there were going to be two of them. Only one was constructed. The intention was to separate plutonium from spent fuel. Over 9,000 tonnes of spent fuel was reprocessed, from 9 different countries. Unfortunately, there was a time when the QA was falsified. Then, there was a leak, which was contained. The reasons behind THORPs perceived failures & THORPs closure, which include global & domestic political interference, make for a fascinating story. My comment here over simplified everything.
I used to use your 'How the Internet Works' video to teach computer science at a UK secondary school made before this channel was started, so I am glad to have bumped into you again. I certainly just learned something! This would make so much more sense as one of the fears of nuclear energy is literally the problem of handling waste. If we can turn that waste into more usable fuel, then it would make a huge difference.
@@Marqan some people are just naturally enthusiastic like this. If it helps other young people get interested and more educated in topics like this then I am all for it.
45th year in commercial nuclear power. Done just about everything I could in different roles at the plants including licensed senior Reactor operator. In my last phase now as consultant on the design team for a small modular reactor. Civilian nuke from the merchant marine. I've found that the nuke industry has some of the most dedicated, bright, creative, hard working people I've ever had the honor of working with and establishing friendship with. Keep the core covered!
I enjoyed the video. Perhaps a future topic could be about how we're failing to use the abundant "waste" of thorium-232 to create fissile uranium-233 to be used in highly efficient fluid-fuel breeder reactors (like the LFTR). Once again, these technological concepts were proven to work back in the 60's, but development of the thorium fuel cycle in the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) was halted in favor of fast breeder reactors that could produce weapons-grade Plutonium-239.
Romans 10:9 = Eternal life 1 John 5:3 “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous.” Ecclesiastes 12:13 “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.”
Just a note.. as someone who has worked for several years in the nuclear power sector in the US.. not all nuclear waste is the recyclable ’spent fuel rods’. There is plenty of additional ‘low level’ radioactive waste that is made up of contaminated materials created (for example) during maintenance activities and fluids that have become contaminated. These are most likely not recyclable and do represent a long term burden to the country.
Geoff..,you are correct. The French ran the most efficient nuclear program in the world and recycled and even bred fuel? But now after their old reactors need to be decommissioned they are being crushed under the burden of all the low level nuclear waste. What people fail to realize that even after a couple hundred years after the spent fuel is cooled off and not nearly as high level radioactive waste, this low level waste is the most dangerous because all the new created fission isotopes are more dangerous than the original low level radioactive fresh fuel...because they're all readily absorbed and spread throughout the environment and must be stored to prevent this for hundreds of thousands of years. This is the deadly part if it all.
@Mr. Richard C. It is much more dangerous because it is a witches brew of radioactive isotopes not found naturally in coal. The mercury in coal is more of a concern than the isotopes in coal
@@gb-jg1ud Good example. And to me it's like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. We need solid solutions for dealing with all the waste, not this high level marketing campaign from the nuclear power lobbies telling us it will be safe, trust us...
The only thing which kind of nobody mentions about nuclear energy, is the incredible high cost in comparison to sun, wind, water or geo energy 🤷♂️ reused nuclear energy would be great but if it's even more expensive than the one time usage, it's wasted time and money🤷♂️
@@maddinek best to be a little sceptical of what you read/hear. Maybe I am biased due to my profession, but in my view it is the only practical means of getting any near to net zero in next 50 years.
"quality communicators" I hate how people will rather listen to "quality communicators" who are not even old enough to have taken the education required to work in the field of science being explained. Its like choosing to listen to an 18 year old Greta Thunberg rather than someone who´s been working 8 years to become a climatologist and another 4 to publish his paper.
I wish I had seen this video before. I always assumed that it should be possible to re-use nuclear waste, but not being an expert, never dove into it. So thanks for doing this and share it. You have one of the best science channels on YT, I think, please keep up the excellent work and make the world a little smarter!
Instant Sub. I love when a subject is "Objectively" researched and presented in a positive manner. So many subjects are "SCARY" and people do not want to even discuss them due to their own inherent bias. Thank you!
@@libertariantranslator1929 Let's be honest, lefties are the problem here because if climate change was solved with nuclear power, there wouldn't much room left to solve it with a tyrannical soc ial ist government, which has always been their real goal. The issue is never about the actual issue, that's why their solutions are never anything other than more socialism. They're not environmentalists, they're watermelons... green on the outside but red on the inside.
Yes, but this one is one-sided. It focuses only on the vision. If you look more clearly, you see that there still is no solution for low-level waste and that the necessary reactors are the higher risk ones. Check out Detroit's history :-)
Yes, "amazing". Amazingly WRONG. Case in point: the 235 in U-235 is *NOT* the number of neutrons in the uranium atom, as she casually spews out at 7:07 in an authoritative voice. 235 is the number of protons *PLUS* the number of neutrons in the nucleus. If you knew basic physics you would have understood what a whopper of a fackup this is to have in a "science" video. But judging by the fact that you have to get your science from a Saturday morning cartoon, this is clearly far beyond your understanding, and you will therefore swallow any piece of garbage as "ability to explain technology" and get amazed by it. I would suggest reading a book or two, but I highly doubt that is within your ability.
Just discovered this channel. This video is AMAZING. Informative, inspiring, perfect length and well researched. Cleo, you're doing wonderful work here. Thank you.
Cleo is awesome definitely subscribe, sad to see she's not at 1MM yet Everyone's talking about how journalism is dying and I'm like "nah, it just moved to youtube, it's the institutions that are dying not journalism itself"
When I was a kid, I always wondered why it wasn’t couldn’t be recycled, which was pretty much what we were told. You learn new things every day and this was definitely new for me
In the early days of my career I was in the Nuclear power industry. I was taught that the best thinking was a single Turbine floor in the center of several reactor vessels. Design life was limited to 40 years at that time. (I believe they have extended that to more like 40-60 years.) Based on the reactor build time the first reactor would be started up. Followed by a second reactor starting after start up of the first. With 8 reactors the fuel removed from the reactor at the end of life is sent for recycling. The first reactor is rebuilt 300 years from now allowing for radioactive cool down before humans need to do the work. While I am no longer in the industry, at that time the NRC said no you can not do that, you have to return the land to its original state. The costs were very high and with TMI and Chernobyl nuclear power died, as far as new plants were concerned. Even existing plants have trouble getting fully qualified parts. The nuclear industry fell apart here in the US with no demand to cost justify maintaining Qualifications. Cost to clean up the spent fuel would run in the trillions and it needs done. Is this the first step to the second question below? The one question that I have not researched is were did it come from to begin with and can we return it to its original state and just put it back? I know the environmentalist would say no to putting a natural material that is from the earth back into the earth. I am sure there is still unmined Uranium in the earth. Separate food for thought - Thorium reactors have been toughted as fuel that would not run away. While radioactive it would cool down with a power loss to the plant. My thought was that Admiral Rickenbacker (No Dis-respect admiral if my spelling is off) was shown Uranium and Thorium and picked Uranium to power the navy and make nuclear devices.
Thorium reactors are considered sustainable reactors, since the actual fuel, plutonium, is created in the process entirely within the reactor. It's created, and consumed in one place, which mitigates risk of nuclear materials dealings, and the designs are such that the systems maintaining the reaction aren't preventing overloading, but instead preventing it suffocating itself with neutron poisoning. Like instead of having a fire and you control it by cooling off the stuff near it it's a fire that requires you keep actively providing it with oxygen. So if secondary power or systems fail, they fail to a condition where the reaction kills itself. The designs are amazing. A bonus is that almost all the real waste is either very short half life or extremely long making it easy to dispose of. Highly radioactive stuff isn't radioactive long, so you can store it securely for just weeks, and the other stuff is in the realm of natural background radiation.
@@thekwoka4707 All nuclear power plants since RBMK design failure are self limiting, self failing reactor designs. ALL commercial designs use a negative temperature coefficient (temp goes up, reaction rate goes down); but as with anything, everything can fail lol. Its not that the "Reaction kills itself"; its "how fast". lol
So in spite of how stupid all that was, and in spite of the fact that only 3% of the potential energy was used before the fuel was discarded, what do you know about why the molten salt thorium reactor was scrubbed when it was so much safer and had no fuel waste issues?
7:09 "The number refers to the Number of Neucleons of the atom" not Neutrons. Cause U-235 and U-238 means Uranium with those masses. Just a small correction which might be slipped through post production. Thanks for the amazing video.
The experts in the KIT in Karlsruhe told me this when I attended my radiation protection course. They said, the only problem with the recycling process is that the same equipment which enables you to recycle nuclear waste can be used to build material for nuclear bombs. Not an issue for the US but for a country which is not yet capable to do so, it is a problem. A political problem.
Yeah. At the point where she said that she had to prove her US citizenship and wasn't allowed to film inside, she should have mentioned the problem of national security and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. If you can recycle Uranium 235 from spent fuel, you can also get the weapon's grade Plutionium. To be fair, she mentioned Jimmy Carter's ban but she made it look like an anecdote instead of explaining the gravity of the topic in full scale. And still there's the bottom line: It's cheaper to burn "fresh" Uranium instead of recycled Uranium. And if you're ready to invest more money in more expensive recyceled fuel then why not invest that money in renewably energy where you don't have to consider fuel cost at all?
Imagine other countries in the world doing this. The US would outright threaten them with war if they did. The video skipped over a lot of downsides making it sound like they are just an inconvenience. Political issues. Issues with managing and storing plutonium. The fact that there is a lot of nuclear waste that are not spent fuel rods ...
So, without getting into too many details here, just having the material to build a weapon doesn't give you the ability to do so. There is a LOT involved, which is why you don't see rogue nukes popping up everywhere. If a nation really wants nukes and is willing to pay the cost, there is little anyone can do to stop them short of military action. And there is absolutely nothing stopping a nation from operating nuclear power plants and processing spent fuel for plutonium. Many countries reprocess fuel already.
It's a problem because the US *thinks* that they (and their friends) are the only ones responsible/smart/privileged enough to be allowed to have nuclear weapons.
Just discovering this series. So informative, thought provoking, and easy to enjoy. I look forward to these on my coffee breaks. The topics are also very interesting, keep them coming Cleo, you are doing a great job!
Great video! I’m a Nuclear Operator at Hanford Nuclear Reservation and this would solve so many issues of storage of nuclear waste and should be implemented as soon as possible!
Excellent video. Now do one on LFTRs; this stands for Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors. These reactors were also developed at Argonne national laboratories. Many benefits to LFTR reactors including vastly reduced nuclear waste and most of it does not last ten thousand years, much reduced physical foot print because there's no need to contain a steam explosion, and finally, what the public loves, is the nuclear reaction inherently cannot cause a meltdown. American Scientist had a very informative article on them written by Dr Hargraves.
The main advantage for LFTRs that I'm aware about is that thorium is extremely abundant and is currently treated as a waste material by most mining operations. If we could build viable LFTRs, then we'd be able to turn those waste piles into energy. The main issue that I'm aware of is that the molten liquid salt is highly corrosive; and has been in need of some advances in material science before they can be made viable. On the MSR vs LFTR issue, my opinion is that humankind would be better off if both were in an easily commercializable state. More arrows in our technological quiver, as it were.
Same problem as with waste fuel. Too expensive. Both these technologies were developed when we thought we'd have a shortage of uranium. But then we found more uranium deposits and the cost of manufacturing new fuel crashed (because all the plants had already been built). As such there was no economic incentive to use Thorium or waste fuel. Some countries like India, China and Japan which don't have significant domestic sources of uranium might consider it as a national security thing, but other than that there is little incentive.
@@veergauba Incorrect, prepping waste fuel pellets for molten salt fast breeder reactors is cheap and you only have to do it once. Turning it back into solid pellets as described in this video is expensive and has to be done over and over.
U 235, refers to the atomic mass (number of protons and neutrons) and not the number of neutrons. Isotopes of same element have different number of neutrons.
The element is determined by the number of protons. The Isotope number is a combination of the protons and neutrons. Therefore, the difference between U-235 and U-238 is entirely a difference in neutrons. She just skipped to the end without going through all the details.
@@DarkLordSparky Time 7:10 she said: The number refers to the number of neutrons in the atom. I get that youre a fan having your white knight moment, but cmon. Dont defend stuff you know isnt right
@@de0509 I agree she should have said "the difference in the numbers relates to the number of neutrons" but that is really splitting hairs in a layperson video, like this one.
Great video, Iove learning about revolutionary tech. You've made it so interesting as well. By the way, I think there's a small mistake in the video. The 235 in uranium 235 refers to the relative atomic mass which is the no. of protons and (average) no. of neutrons added together.
You've become one of those channels that I drop everything I'm doing when I see a new video dropped. There's only 4 other channels. Boston Dynamics, The Physics Girl, Smarter every day, and Tom Scott.
Hi, Cleo. Just got across a few of your videos, and I must say they’re among the best on YT. Interesting topics, deep research, referenced sources, cool images and editing, and on top a very charming presenter. Congratulations to you and your team for putting this up.
I just had a discussion yesterday with a coworker who pushed back when I referred to the fear of nuclear power as “irrational.” I’m looking forward to sharing this video and your channel with him.
The fear itself isn't irrational, most reactor designs can be hugely dangerous in the wrong circumstances, and our weather gets more unpredictable and more extreme each year, it seems. Additionally for profit companies can't be trusted to handle waste in a way that is not harmful to people and/or the environment. However, I have seen plenty of irrational fear about anything nuclear.
Statistically it's irrational BUT...... when it goes wrong it goes VERY wrong, and renders large areas uninhabitable for thousands of years. I think the people of Ukraine, the East Urals, and Japan would not agree that the fear is irrational. Some smaller scale incidents like Windscale, Sellafield, and Three Mile Island were lucky escapes. We should not forget that. Given the energy companies are putting all their research and development budgets into renewables now it's doubtful any of them will revert to old tech reactors which are massively expensive to build and maintain. Nuclear has had its day.
@@woopimagpie Nuclear is the future, it is the only real good working solution. The only problem with nuclear energy production is bad planning, bad policies, and bad safety mechanism. Every nuclear disaster that has happened would have been completely avoided if the right people spent more time planning, making good safety policies, and made better safety mechanisms.
@@woopimagpie I have reliable sources in Australia where apparently the modelling doesn't show that Nuclear could get up and running soon enough to be competitive against renewables. Though we don't have any existing infrastructure, and our ability to generate from renewables is quite good. I imagine it'd be a different situation elsewhere like America. I do still low key want to live in the atomic future envisioned in the 50's and 60's. Interestingly I read that Japan reversed its nuclear pause last year due to the energy shortages due to Ukraine.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I had a relative who was involved with nuclear engineering that worked on a project to create commercial versions of these 'garbage reactors' and watched that work get halted by President Carter's nuclear policies. You have touched briefly on all the major key points I'm aware of. The biggest point of attack from anti-nuclear groups is the talk of cost and arguing that dollars spent on new reactors is dollars not spent on renewables. Hopefully more media like this will help break down the barriers and help us find the will to explore this maligned form of energy production as a means to move us away from fossil fuels faster.
Did every other country in the world also get halted by Carter. Conspiracy theories fall apart if you realize that there are other countries in the world that also don't build "garbage reactors"
Cleo, I LOVE the insight you bring to this topic - and frankly, to all topics that you cover. My wife and I found your channel through your collaboration with Johnny Harris just last week, jumped around in your back catalog, and subscribed. I love the work being done by a lot of independent videojournalists and educators doing in-depth explainers on interesting topics - CGP Grey, Johnny Harris, UsefulCharts, The B1M, Stewart Hicks, Wendover Productions, Real Engineering, SciShow, MinuteEarth, Nonstop Dan, Extra History, Howard Ho, Kurzgesagt, etc., but while they are all great, and they have all taught me fascinating things that I didn't know, I don't think any of them have successfully challenged my thinking on topics as they explore them the way you do in nearly every video. You are not just one among many explainers on TH-cam, you are THE BEST on TH-cam at this. I'm so glad I've found your channel - keep it up, I look forward to finishing your back catalog and all of your future work!
This has been done for over 40 years in the UK at a re processing plant near Blackpool. It does not make money in the conventional sense but is deemed to 'save' money as storing nuclear waste is very expensive. This plant has reprocessed spent fuel from many parts of the world including Japan.
Micha Egi is right. The tech described in the video is the electrochemical or pyroprocessing fuel recycling developed originally for the Integral Fast Reactor at ANL/INL and doesn't produce a pure Pu stream like the PUREX tech used in the UK & France. It basically electroplates all the minor actinides along with the Pu and significant amounts of U as well into a single stream. Much safer from a proliferation perspective and should be cheaper, although that is yet to be proven commercially.
@@richardbaird1452 Thanks for the clarification, although I wouldn't call that 'totally different'. At the level of this video, the point is that fuel rods are only 1-4% used and reprocessing is an existing technology it would make a lot of sense to use. The details of the reprocessing tech are a relatively minor matter, although you are right that methods with lower proliferation risk are more likely to succeed. Which is good because the worldwide record of fast reactors/breeders has been 'chequered', with the French closing theirs in 1998, the US building one and never turning it on (IIRC?), the Japanese building one but shutting it down quite quickly and the UK closing Dounreay in 1977. Only the Russians are still running commercial-scale fast breeders (BN-600, BN-800) (pity they've made themselves pariahs recently - they might have been able to sell us all fast breeders). Although I see from world-nuclear.org's 'fast reactor' page that there is a Chinese reactor under construction now too.
Cost has got to stop being a reason to not do things. We HAVE GOT TO fix this world. This kind of in-depth reporting is what will help us get to the end-point we need. Really well done Cleo!! ❤
We can still use cost, the problem is that we are not accounting for the future cost of all of the externalities of foaisle fuels. We must use the lifetime cost rather than the current cost to make our decisions.
Agree. The US national debt is 31 trillion dollars right now. How much nuclear recycling could have been accomplished if we'd spent the money more wisely? How much more energy independent would we be at this stage?
Cost never stopped the good ole US of A from raging war. It's all about power and greed. The people with the money and the power will generally only do what they feel will sustain or increase their money/power.
Unfortunately it is a lot of the reason why we don't do things. The same reason why plastic recycling isn't successful and metal recycling is so successful, money. Metal recycling is so profitable whereas plastic isnt.
@@themasstermwahahahah then you are basically against capitalism, where the only numbers that matter are the here and now. Quarterly profit margins are sacred, whatever happens tomorrow or a thousand years from now is SEP (Somebody Else's Problem).
Cleo you're so underrated. Thank you for a channel that is so optimistic about the future. With the huge amounts of news we get these days and how we often see all the bad on our feeds, videos like these are so refreshing. Currently my fav channel!
I have designed many machines over the years and always found the greatest obstacle comes from those at the top. Their focus is on their life and not their descendants. This mind set needs to change before anything else and move forward.
came from Harris on a nice Sunday documentary binge... crazy how accurate the algorithm can be. Your good, nice storyline, well executed. Johnny's transitions felt a little more poppy... but that's subjective. Subscribe lol.
@ 13.02 "...we just need to commercialize it." Current projections in the nuclear industry suggest breeder technology could be effectively commercialized by 2050. That's WAY too late to be any use against climate change. But it'll work fine for proliferation in the meantime. "We just need to commercialize it" is actually a really big problem.
I was always skeptical about nuclear power upto like 6 months ago. I've been rethinking it ever since. One of my biggest concerns was the nuclear waste. I kept asking friends, and even a state representative here in Illinois who is pro-nuclear, when I asked him about the nuclear waste aspect of it, he didn't have a comforting answer. I don't think he knows about this process, because he didn't even hint at it, or he simply hid it well. He simply said, "yes it's a problem, and we don't know yet..." That was after he told me, Illinois was building 2 additional plants... so you could only imagine how I felt about it... a friend of mine, about a year ago, briefly mentioned that nuclear waste can be reused, but that was as much as he said... so I'm glad I did a TH-cam search on the subject. I find this 17 minute answer much more clarifying, and comforting. Now I have to sit and think what other doubts I might have about nuclear energy, but as of right now, I have none. Thanks.
I highly recommend looking into Nuclear Thorium reactors. They cut down on the amount of waste drastically. Plus Thorium is much more abundant than Uranium. Why hasn't this been used you ask? Because they can't use to make bombs and the decision in the US was initially made to make bombs.
@@Jmaters83 Its gonna be used heavily in india, because they have a lot of thorium. Did you find a video regarding nuclear thorium in english? Please tell me, if you did.
@@Jmaters83 Thorium is neutron transformed into Pa-233 which decays into U-233. It's just another Uranium isotope in the end with waste containment and storage costs.
@@WaryofExtremes That is sort of the beauty and terrible nature of capitalism. Far before we run out of uranium, the cost to buy and enrich uranium will balance and finally surpass the cost of recycling as uranium becomes less plentiful and recycling costs go down through innovation. At that point, we will begin to bring out the old uranium and recycle it. We have fixes in place for the dangers of the plutonium that would be gathered too called down-blending. It will be done, just not yet.
As someone who knows next to nothing about this stuff, recycling nuclear waste always seemed like it should be a thing… “We have too much of this dangerous stuff and not enough energy!” “What’s dangerous about it?” “It gives off too much energy!” “If we used that energy, would it be less dangerous?” “Yes, of course!” “…”
yup. that is why they designed new reactors to use the spent fuel from old reactors . it is real, and there already are functioning reactors that are running on waste from old reactors
It is a thing. I'll give you an example. Most nuclear reactors need ENRICHED URANIUM for them to work in a reactor. That means, you need to boost the amount of actual uranium in the fuel bundle in order for the reactor to start up. Once that % of uranium is below a certain level, it is spent fuel and unusable FOR THAT REACTOR. HOWEVER, if you have a heavy-water moderated reactor - like the Canadian CANDU reactor, that reactor design allows you to use NATURAL uranium - no enrichment needed. Why is this the case? Because the heavy water used in the reactor, is such an efficient moderator of the neutrons that are emitted by the fuel for the chain reaction to start, you don't need as much uranium to get the reaction started. The cool thing is, that not only can you use natural uranium, (no enrichment) the reactor can also use thorium and plutonium and, get this, the SPENT FUEL of other reactors. China, or example purchased from Canada, a CANDU reactor. What the Chinese do is take the spend fuel from their regular nuclear reactors and feed their CANDU with the spent fuel, to get more electrical power out of it. The CANDU design has other benefits - it can also REFUEL WHILE RUNNING - the only reactor design in the world that does this. The French recently hd problems with their reactors having to go offline - mostly because they had to refuel. Not a problem with CANDU, and that's why CANDU reactors hold many of the world records in continuous operation. Add to that, the fuel pellets that that company Cameco makes for the reactors is mixed in a ceramic - almost like a glass - so when the fuel is fully used up, all of the radioactive elements are encased in the ceramic - no leaking to groundwater if you decide to bury it for long term storage. Finally, because radioactivity is ENERGY, if you leave the radioactive materials in water, you will naturally get hydrogen produced. Hello, HYDROGEN. Hydrogen that can go into a fuel cell. Hydrogen that can be burned in a hydrogen combustion motor. Many activists are just CLUELESS of the engineering that can be done to make all of this possible. Seriously, we just need to let the engineers do their jobs, and ignore the activists in this case - they have no viable solutions, they have not done the math, and those countries that went crazy with solar/wind (Germany), they have major power bills because despite building 200% of what they need in capacity, solare and wind only deliver 49% of what they need. They spent anywhere between 500 BILIION EURO to a whopping 2 TRILLION Euro. If 500 Billion where spend in nuclear - every German household and company could heat their building with electricity, dry clothes with electric, cook food with electric, and still have power left over to SELL to other countries. And that power is 24/7/365.
From what i can tell is the reason we dont do it. Is because internationally it will make other countrys realize that they should do nuclear power and the concern is this will create nuclear weapons for thous countrys and so we cant have nice things.
There are companies that recycle nuclear waste for reuse in nuclear reactors. However, based off my limited knowledge, apparently recycled fuel becomes no longer economically viable after the second time it's used. So while useful, it's use is still nonetheless limited. And as Joe stated above, nuclear energy is still better than wind and solar. Germany in all of its environmental genius has caused an increase in deaths in its local population due to restarting coal plants after realizing that solar and wind was shockingly insufficient to meet its energy needs. Oh yeah they are also buying nuclear power from France which is pretty silly.
@@letsstudyquantum wrong in every way possible... I can't even begin to describe how wrong this is. If you actually watched the video you'd know that other countries are ALREADY doing this. Nuclear power fuel is nowhere near the requirements for nuclear bomb weapons. Also almost every other country in the world has nuclear power plants and had them for AGES.
Thank you for this video. I'm an engineer, and i didn't know this. It doesn't shock me that the barriers to implementation have been political, and not technical. Let's hope this pushes ahead.
Very interesting. It's something we need to explore reviving. A few decades back, I regularly visited Argonne because I sold them imaging instruments for doing X-ray crystallography. It's was a lot easier to get in pre 9/11. Also, the original Argonne site is about 3.5 miles east of the current facility in Red Gate Woods Forest Preserve. The early research reactors are buried there. They used to be fenced off, but it was determined they don't pose a danger to hikers, so the fence was removed and interpretive signs were added. Back when the Manhattan Project started, it was really remote. And finally, I think Johnny bears a strong resemblance to Toby Maguire, who had an interesting encounter with a radioactive spider in one of his movies.
I remember reading about this like forever ago, when I was still a teenager and being like, "wait, what?!". Funny seeing your exact same reaction 🤣 Great video. It's the public perception of what nuclear power represents that is SO flawed. Hard to see it changing given the rampant ignorance of seemingly everyone
It's a big giant dumb kettle using 80 year old technology to boil water which produces the most toxic by product in the universe whose real purpose was to make nuclear bombs. There are easier, better, cheaper, cleaner ways to make electricity now. If you can't see that then maybe you are the ignorant one.
this is called MOX reprocessing or "mixed oxide" fuel, and it's certainly not a silver bullet. Japan had to get the reprocessing perfomed in France and the worst thing you can do with high level waste is move it around. Nuclear energy is worth pursuing for sure, but it's currently the most expensive possible way to make power, and reprocessing only make that cost higher. It's technically viable for sure but then so is Fusion. more research needed for both, and LFTR thorium.
There is nuclear reacor called bn-800 (fast neutron reactor 800 MegaWatt ), which is working on 100% MOX-fuel for almost a year already. And procedures of reprocessing MOX-fuel for that type of reactors are already at industrial production scales
Japan is working on getting its own reprocessing facility online. I agree that in terms of cost it’s not really worth reprocessing for somewhere like the US with reliable partners with plenty of uranium like Canada. But for energy deprived countries like Japan that treats nuclear energy as a part of their national security, reprocessing makes a lot of sense!
always the money, eh. Isnt the clean part worth it? The material in a motorbike helmet costs maybe 5 bucks in mass, but you still pay hundreds because your head is worth it
Hi cleo i know you are gonna see this cause you'll be hanging around for some time here after uploading... just wanna say thanks for educating us on such important topics and cheers to your awesome work... keep up the good work
As a scientist, I find your videos super clear and to the point, even when explaining some very complicated concepts. You're a fantastic storyteller! Subscribed.
The bit I am missing are the difficulties running fast reactors safely. There is much less margin of error with fast reactors (look up "void coefficient" for more information) and this is not irrational "fear" but a real risk. Assessing this risk lead to an already built fast reactor in Germany never being used (SNR-300 in Kalkar).
Integrating chemical separation of spent fuel fission products into the consumer power industry is just merging nuclear weapons production into power production. It has serious implications with regard to weapons proliferation. For example, during the period of Japan's foray into reprocessing, enough plutonium to manufacture several nuclear weapons was "lost" or unaccounted for. The problem of liquid waste produced in reprocessing has not been solved, will cost trillions and the current plan for such waste is to kiln fire it into ceramic blocks. DOE estimates that $300 billion to $640 billion will be needed to finish all of Hanford's environmental cleanup by 2078. That translates to annual budgets of $5.4 billion at the low end of the estimate to $11 billion at the high end, according to DOE's 2022 Hanford LIfecycle Scope, Schedule and Cost Report. The existing ceramic industry already pours millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere yearly. Con jobs on this scale are beyond all sanity and reason and will bankrupt countries involved in these industries.
I recently found this channel. I enjoyed your episodes on Fusion and now this episode on the "forgotten" approach to recycling nuclear waste from fission plants. I'd love to show you the progress being made in IFE and the timing would be best toward the end of this year early in Q1 of '25. I see great potential for an episode that documents the journey towards MJ class lasers, among other crucial building blocks for IFE.
2:00 I always find it funny and pathetic that every time they talk about "emissions" and "pollution" on TV, they illustrate it with the cooling towers that emit... water vapour.
The big problem of the fast reactor is that the power is more expensive, the reactor is not as safe and you get a lot of Plutonium which is much more dangerous than Uranium waste and you can build atomic weapons out of it. So if every country in the world would build fast reactors we would probably get big problems with Plutonium getting into wrong hands.
I agree with your first two points, but the fact is "every country in the world" is not going to use fast reactors for the simple reason that only a minority of countries even use nuclear at all. If every "First World" country (i.e. Free World countries that are also "developed economies") that already uses conventional reactors were to build some fast reactors for themselves, then the proliferation risk (from those specific countries) would be non-existent. This is not only because they already have considerable non-proliferation protocols, but also because they can use the plutonium as fuel for civilian reactors before it becomes a proliferation risk in the first place. The fact that current fast reactors are less safe than current conventional reactors is a legitimate concern, but they're still safer than all non-nuclear sources of power, so I'd say the risk is negligible.
So you clearly saw the rest of the video to see that other countries did continue to recycle, and that Reagan lifted the ban in 1981. And those big problems with plutonium getting into the wrong hands over the past 42 years?
@@ironworkerfxr7105 this is to easy. Every incident with nuclear power plant happened because of stupid people. In Chernobyl it happened because people ignored the rules of how to handle the nuclear reactor. In Fukushima it was not smart to build a nuclear power plant in an earthquake zone. No we use nuclear power and produce highly dangerous waste that will last for tens of thousands of generations. This is pure egoism. The responsible thing to do would be to recycle that waste and reduce as much of the waste for future generations as possible.
@@ironworkerfxr7105 what about fukushima? Do i need to remind you it failed because A) it was the worst tsunami since the 1800s B) the backup generators placement was unsafe, general electric told them to put it elsewhere C) anothe reactor that was CLOSER to the tsunami source was literally just fine because it was better designed
You continually capture my attention on such highly relevant topics, in particular, this one! Your intensity and enthusiasm are contagious to such an extent that your channel is the ONLY channel I subscribe to. The only one I've felt captivated enough to hit in my over 20 years of "internetting". Keep up the great work and thank you for keeping it real and not attempting to "sensationalize" the material for "views".
NEWLY SUBSCRIBED! Im so thankful you came up on my shorts feed. I actually saw that Johnny Harris video on nuclear power and i cant believe i didnt go over to yours. Well, im here now and glad for it. LOVE YOUR CONTENT and your style of presentation.
I currently work at a nuclear fuel manufacturing plant and this video is spot on. I think micro reactors will change the future of our power capabilities and the negative stigma around large nuclear reactor facilities. This video adds another aspect to the equation that will make it even better in the future. This is good stuff!
Common sense would also say that it's not a good idea to have many small potential sources of radioactive contamination rather than a few large ones that are well cared for. Do you realize how many idiots there are across society and what small modular reactors all over the country would mean for safety? I'd rather have a few large ones with economies of scale and a guarantee that some experts are always there.
After over 30 years in the nuclear (government) industry, I would say we never met an engineering challenge we couldn't solve, but had a very poor record of overcoming political challenges.
IMHO i think this is not very surprising given the extreme political implications of nuclear weapons. Nuclear power has always and will always play second fiddle to nuclear weapons.
Fusion power?
@@SunShine-xc6dh Can't bet on a technology we don't have yet.
@@SunShine-xc6dh fusion is not so much an engineering problem but a political one too.
@@brodude7194 as in the politicians won't give you unlimited funding until you hopefully maybe figure out if you can extract useful power from it in useful amounts?
FULL DISCLOSURE: My undergrad degree is in Nuclear Engineering, I am a retired Naval Officer (submarines, nuclear weapons) and a retired Radiation Health Physicist, who worked for 25 years with the Washington Office of Radiation Protection. I admit to having opinions on this topic.
First, this was very well done. I believe that it captured the general situation, though there are a couple of points that I think you and your viewers might find interesting:
1. When fuel is reprocessed, not only the U235, but also the plutonium is usable as fissile material in new few. The plutonium was the excuse used to shut down the U.S. reprocessing efforts, but it really isn't very good for making nuclear weapons with. Basically, if you want "weapons grade" plutonium, you want to "cook" the fuel for a short time; days or weeks, depending on things. When fuel is in the reactor for years, the plutonium will have too much of the wrong isotopes. So, when you get down to it, our reprocessing program was shut down because of several lies.
2. With radioactive material, the half-life and how radioactive it is per number of atoms, or by weight, are linked. The shorter the half-life, the more radioactive it is. Fresh nuclear fuel, that hasn't been in a reactor, isn't radioactive enough to need special handling (though it is handled carefully, because it is REALLY expensive, and you wouldn't believe the amount of paperwork if you dent it). Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) is VERY radioactive, but the radioactivity start dropping as soon as the reactor is turned off. After about 10-30 years it is not hot enough to damage the fuel rods. After about 100 years it isn't very radioactive, anymore. After about 300 it is about as radioactive as when it went into the reactor. This is because the most radioactive fission fragments have short half-lives, and as those atoms decay, they aren't replaced, and eventually decay into stable atoms. So much of the problem with storing SNF is overstated, especially how long it needs to be stored.
3. Depending on a variety of factors, SNF can be used to make more energy without reprocessing it. The easiest way is with a Heavy Water Reactor, along the lines of the Canadian CANDU reactors.
Overall, a good job.
"but also the plutonium is usable as fissile material in new few"
Do you mean 'new fuel?' Thanks for the lengthy response.
@@jfkst1 Yes, new fuel.
What about the reactor shielding material?
And all the other contaminated bits?
@@DerSolinski are you referring to once an old reactor is decommissioned? Or what?
@@johnwright6706 Any radioactive garbage that is generated.
There is a lot more than just fuel.
Even protective clothing needs to be properly disposed.
As my understanding those radioactive byproducts are far more problematic then the actual fuel.
And the danger they pose is greatly underestimated.
Pretty crazy that boiling water is probably the most important thing in human history.
Well, water was pretty important first... then fire came along to be pretty important too... makes sense that in combination they're pretty awesome. Simple. But awesome.
asctually its fire the ablity to make fire that started it all
@@reggiebannister1080umm actually its water. I dare you to go a week without it. I dare you to go a week without fire
@quiladog9302 a week without fire would mean no use of most human technology because we use fire for powering cars, electricity, building alloys and so many other things. Water and fire are fundamental parts of humanity.
@@Koltwood-tr4kt but wed survive. A week without water is… death
After 6 years as a nuclear operator in the Navy, I spent 7 years working in nuclear waste disposal. This wasn't spent fuel, but mostly contaminated water and filtration media. By the time I quit the industry, the regulatory environment was incredibly hostile. It was as though the government was punishing the nuclear industry for existing. If you want to use the technology discussed here, you must first get government to work with you, not against you. We will always have radioactive wastes other than spent fuel. Therefore, we will have to find new ways to deal with this as well as the spent fuel.
Definitely need to get the government with us. Engineering can solve the problems. There are other options for energy too such as drilling down about two miles pumping water down to create steam in an almost unlimited supply of steam turbine energy. Government officials just can’t fathom technical problems and solutions. They think nuclear waste is the morning after eating atomic wings……
Says a lot about government. Bureaucrats are by nature cautious and overzealous. This also suits left-wing politicians who by their nature want to control the population.
Tbh if you’re in the navy, you are the government. It sounds like the solution is more educated regulation which will now be significantly harder after the abolition of the chevron doctrine.
@@Idealist_Metaphor I think we just need the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House to pick up the topic, bring in experts and consultants, decide on a direction and propose the changes. I looked up some info from their site and looks like they were talking about storage and recycling of fuel in April 2024, saying they are developing their policies to support the new advanced reactors that recycle the fuel.
@@Idealist_Metaphor Isn't 'educated regulation' an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp?
This is VERY well made. Super impressed.
I literally was watching this and thinking "I wonder if Kyle Hill has seen this!" I feel Cleo needs to make an appearance at The Facility!
Very well made, pretty impressive.... INCREADIBLY infuriating! I'm 35 years old and for at least 20 years I've been going on about how nuclear energy is NOT what people seem to think it is. All across the political spectrum people disagreed with me - though, to be honest, the farther left you went, the more disagreement I encountert. Now suddenly, after completely stopping all progress for decades people are suddenly coming around to the idea.... Well guess what: too little, too late! Germany has shut down all it's nuclear reactors. Other countries have not upgraded their reactors in decades, because the general consensus has been that nuclear energy is bad and should not be advanced.
And to all the people saying that this is about recycling: yes, but as shown in the video, recycling into the existing nuclear plants!! Doesn't work for countries that don't have them anymore because of decades of ridiculous, uninformed fear mongering!
Honestly, every single person who's ever been against nuclear energy should a) give themselves a pat on the back for accelerating climate change and b) shut up.
However, I'm afraid, that still she managed to omit one quite crucial fact:
Starting composition of the fuel rods.
I mean, there is only 3-5% of "active" Uranium-235 to begin with…
Basically, "nuclear waste" is fuel rod with ~5% depletion, so the recycling process can go around for quite a long time…
It should have been mentioned…
Nuclear myths debunking guy Kyle here!🙋♂️👍
YOOOOO THERE HE IS
Hi Cleo, I’m a retired NASA Engineer, but before I joined the space industry with NASA (and Fairchild and Orbital Sciences and a load of other companies), I worked for a company called Vitro where we designed nuclear power plant safety systems. I designed the “Compensation Module” as well as other subsystems that were part of the Anticipatory Reactor Trip System (ARTS). I love what you did in this video and hope you keep it going. Take care, Tom KC3QAC
That is one hell of a list of achievements there. You should be very proud of the work you did to provide us all with safe, clean and reliable power
Tom that rocks! Tell us more, maybe be a guest on a show of cleo's or just film your own
Don't pat yourself on the back too much there big guy.
@@mrtimjitsu stfu Kyle, he's establishing that he can say with professional authority that they did a great job, not tooting his own horn or insulting her work! Skip off back to victimland and shhhh!
@@mrtimjitsu don’t be to envious. Just because you haven’t achieved anything to hang your hat on. Thomas has been on the cutting edge of research where you just join the keyboard mafia group trying to pick apart people better then you for no reason.
Nuclear Engineer here, i'm so happy to see these debunking videos now. You did a great job at making sense of the nuclear waste that oil and gas lobbyists have pushed onto the global energy industry. We all got shafted out of clean energy for fossil fuels, but that's now quickly changing for the better
Clean energy lol so we can store all the waste at your house?
@@SunShine-xc6dh quiet, grownups are talking
@@budwilliams7908 huh last time i checked grown ups take responsibility for the consequences of the actions they advocate. If it's safe it's safe if not you don't just get to pass the buck
@@SunShine-xc6dh yes, actually, one garbage dump , the size of one regular garbage dump, is all you'd need to storage the waste.
It's an incredulously small amount of waste.
Less space than a solar farm.
@@SunShine-xc6dh
Please look for :
The Land Footprint of PV Solar (and Nuclear and Wind Power)
Author : Alki Delichatsios
Mar 4, 2022
AEC developwed Thorium reactors back in WW2 era, it was competing with radium/uranium based reactors. Thorium couldn't be used for weapons so most research was dropped. There are some countries (Canada and China?) working on them to come to fruition. Thorium reactors work like Uranium based reactors as a 'boiler' in power plants. One good thing is thorium reactors can 'eat' a little plutonium in its feed stock, as well as a little U23x. I would love to see you and Johnny do a documentary/series on the 'forgotten Thorium reactors'. BTW, Oakridge Labs ran a Thorium reactor 5 days a week for many years before shutting it down. Yes, they could 'turn it on' on Monday morning and 'off' on Friday night! You gotta check it out!
Thank you for bringing Thorium into the comments.
Someday soon the rest of the world will be using Thorium and the US will be playing catch up.
Knuckleheads!
Thorium molten salt reactors can also use the waste from uranium reactors for fuel and get 200 times more energy per kilogram of fuel comparing to uranium reactors, and by using it in thorium reactor will shorten waste storage time to few hundred of years.
This is what I came to say. Thorium Molten Salt Reactors. All we need is the political will to make this happen.
@@cameronmccoy5051 That's right mate. But unfortunately BIG Greed will not let it happen. Thorium reactors would make electricity way too cheap and they will not tolerate it.
I came to say the same thing. Thorium is the other nuclear rabbbit hole that Cleo doesn’t touch on here in this video. Thorium seems to be the best long term energy solution yet it’s a pariah among regulators.
I've spent over 50 years working with various types of nuclear facilities, including spending a lot of time at the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant during its construction, and I am very impressed at how you simplified complex topics so that anyone can understand them.
Is there any credible source that clearly states waste in Rokkasho because of reprocessing is significantly reduced in radiation level which brings the time down to 200 years + instead of thousands- millions of years? Can't find any source about that.
ok boomer
Chernobyl
@@rickkdev - the analysis is relatively simple. The long half-life materials, such as Pu and 235U, are removed from the waste to be used as fuel. The waste that's left is the very highly radioactive but shorter half-life materials.
@@lamontcranston3177 That was idiocricy of "professionals" who brake the written safety policies. Do you know in Russia there are an old "chernobyl specific" nuclear power plant that is still eunning without any issue? Have you ever fly on a plane while there were many aviation disasters around the world? So annoying while dumb personals living by hysteria and try to hysterize others.
Okay. I live in Japan and surprisingly enough I went to a museum that explained this and I thought of how crazy that was.
What's the museum called?
So what is the catch? It sounds too good to be true and probably it is. She is not talking about the costs. These are probably enormous, since if not, the european countries, like Germany, that are currently investing billions and will do so for decades to find a way to store their waste "savely" somewhere underground, could just pay these billions to Japan and hand over their waste. Why the hell is Japan not offering such a deal? The will not only get "free fuel" for their "recycling plants" but even billions of Euros on top of it.
@@mla2385 no catch, just image issues, and the entire fossile fuel industry lobbying against it.
@M La because you have people who love to fearmonger as soon as they hear the nuclear word and try and stop good progress in its tracks. As soon as misinformed and disingenuous lobby groups hear about such a proposal, they will try to destroy that politicians career - again only from the unfactual fearmongering that always crops up when the nuclear word is mentioned
Cleo may be talking about fast breeder reactors. Those were abandoned by the Japanese and Europeans due to stability problems with the power plants.
Cleo - that was a great summary - one point to add is the plutonium can be used in a mixed oxide fuel (MOX) so it is also recycled, but the supply chain needs to be tightly monitored to prevent nuclear proliferation risks, thanks Bruce.
That actually depends on the kind of recycling process being used. The PUREX process can separate plutonium from uranium and may need tighter monitoring, though you cannot really get high quality (weapons-grade) plutonium from the recycling high-burnup spent fuel. However, if you use pyroprocessing as the recycling method, as described in the video, the plutonium and the uranium cannot become separated, so it is never a proliferation concern. By simply checking the kind of facility you can already ensure that there is no chance of proliferation.
Plutonium is produced and burned in every power reactor ever built. Even the natural reactor 2B years ago produced and consumed PU
12:40 I think the cost of reusing fuel is worth the impact on the earth and security we have for safety, is worth it.
I started my career in nuclear power at the Naval Reactors Facility, where we actually took the spent fuel from the Naval reactors from our nuclear navy. The fuel would be sent 10 miles down the road to the chem lab, where it was processed and sent to a fuel facility to be reused. These facilities were shut down in the 1990’s. As you can see we had a working system of what you suggested. We also had a working reactor that would work as a normal reactor but when it was shut down would actually produce more fuel than was in the original startup(Breeder Reactor)
Genuine question: Do you still have your hair and/or are you a dead person?
Do you have drawings or links to how this worked? Borh the sequencing incl plants and the reactor (type)?
So it worked super well with no disadvantages significant enough to mention them here which is why it was shut down... Of course they shut it down, who doesn't shut down expensive projects that work perfectly? It's not like there were additional problems or reasons why, pfff
@@thulyblu5486 You should look into why hemp was outlawed. The parallels are plain and easy to see.
" We also had a working reactor that would work as a normal reactor but when it was shut down would actually produce more fuel than was in the original startup(Breeder Reactor)"
The Shippingport Experiment? There was a small amount more fissionable material than when it started. Like three percent more. Since it was blanket material it was not really fissionable.
Getting the blanket geometry right was tough, the Shippingport reactor was not intended as a breeder reactor.
This stuck with me when said by a former professor years ago (he was a nuclear engineer for the Navy before teaching):
"If it's still radioactive it's still fuel!"
We're sticking these fuel rods into storage not because they're waste but because we don't want to reprocess them to continue using them due to misguided fears of nuke proliferation.
@@gluttonousmachina2961 Commercial nuclear reprocessing doesn't need 100 years r&d. There have been plenty of commercial plants in real operation that do exactly this - e.g. Sellafield in the UK was doing it 1952 to 2022. The issues are lack of political will, public fear and poor economics when there are other cheap sources of reliable energy (e.g. gas). Real shame we've wasted decades.
@@gluttonousmachina2961 *sigh* fears about ionizing radiation are greatly overblown. Did you know you're being bathed in ionizing radiation _right now_? That's right - we're constantly exposed to a pretty hefty amount of ambient ionizing radiation from space. Our bodies evolved to handle that.
In fact, lab tests suggest that organisms which *aren't* exposed to any ionizing radiation are less healthy... there have been a number of studies on lab mice and rats [shielding a group of them against ambient radiation, then comparing them against a non-shielded control group] which suggest that radiation hormesis (a positive health effect from exposure to ambient ionizing radiation) is actually real. So, while I wouldn't go munching on a bunch of radioactive waste, we also don't have to worry about a little radiation here and there. The Linear No-Threshold model radiation scaremongers like to use has been disproven.
FWIW PM2.5, a component of fossil fuel pollution, kills more people every few days than every nuclear accident in history COMBINED. Heart disease, cancer, strokes, etc... they're all among the most common causes of death, and fossil fuel pollution causes them in many (perhaps even most) cases. Worry about that. For what it's worth, fossil fuel pollution kills more than people every year as died in the Holocaust. Fossil fuels are mass murder. Switching to nuclear power would save millions of lives every single year.
@@gluttonousmachina2961 The same one that peaked in the 70's and has since improved waste treatment facilities, which convert much of this radioactive waste into a solid for long-term storage.
@@gluttonousmachina2961 "We do it because we CAN NOT reprocess them. Might be able to, maybe ... in 100 years after pouring billions into research and development."
is the US 100 years behind the rest of the world?
@@aquaphobicFishalways
The summaries at the end of Huge If True always hit me in the feels. It's the kind of inspiration we need to move forward together instead of hiding alone in fear.
nuclear electricity is economically obsolete. each kWh costs 4-6x more rhan any alternative. hopeless, and economically unjustifiable today.
@@skataskatata9236 yeah but other renewables are not available 24/7
@@skataskatata9236 Storage costs are not exactly prohibitive but have to be included while doing the sums.
I still would like to see fast burner reactors neing built to get rid of residual high level leftovers.
I mean electric power storage not leftover isotopes. As I see it that is just too expensive.
My father was a nuclear physicist for Sandia labs. He and I would talk about his work as much security would allow and one of the topic I distinctly recall was using nuclear waste to generate electricity rather than storing it at WIPP. He saw it as a “waste” of energy and I often questioned him about it. I believe today that it would be in our best interest to use this energy rather than store it. I forgot about these conversations until your segment. Thank you. Wouldn’t be great to get this idea back on track today!
As a former US Navy nuclear power engineer, who is now the father of three boys, I have a very difficult time sometimes explaining high-level physics in ways that they will understand. You do a spectacular job of explaining complex ideas in easy to understand ways that my kids love. Thanks for putting this channel on.
The problem is an out of control environmental groups driven by Media hype that lie cheat and steal for their own aggrandizement and profit.
There's a term for it, it's called science communication
If you understand your subject matter, it is very easy to explain. Sort of like you referring to High Energy Physics as high-level physics. Are they running for office?
What passes for knowledge these days is a lot.
There are 5 known physical forces in the universe, start there. Nuclear is 3 on the list. 2nd is the bond holding cells together, and it has a name. Look it up.
Nuclear is the only one that can eliminate life on earth, and most likely will due to greed and poor education. Being smart enough to 'do not touch' is not taught.
We are so stupid. Gravity is number one and we don't use it to control anything; nor do we use the energy potential. Do the math on Gravity and Nuclear becomes a drop in the bucket in terms of potential energy.
We are playing around with the most dangerous force imaginable without even understanding it, while safe alternatives are under all around us. Engineers don't consider conservation anymore I guess. We sleep through Ethics.
@@GEOsustainable 🤣🤣🤣
@@GEOsustainable we use gravity for hydro electric dams
great video!!!
Spoken from someone who knows all about great videos! 😍
Nice to see you here.
sir, please help fight against big oil and gas, they're killing us
This was YOUR daily dose of internet.
its you
As someone who has studied the nuclear fuel cycle in school, I love how simple this is and how well explained this is for a general audience. Well done. Looking forward to seeing what other great videos you produce
I'm interested to learn about the amount of energy used in the recycling process that seems to resemble electrolysis.
"as someone who studied the nuclear fuel cycle in school"... Credentials... 👌👌👌
@@MelbourneMeMe lol I only have a minor in Nuclear Engineering so like... Not an expert but also much more familiar than most people. My bachelors is in Mechanical Engineering.
@@MelbourneMeMe Don't be so hard on him. Most people study things in school. I did womens studies. A lot of it. You could say that it was 'hard' work but I went very 'deep' in the subject(s) and graduating felt orgasmic! 😏
Neutrons AND protons. The number includes the protons.
Yeah, basic errors in this video. At about 6:15 says U-235 has 235 neutrons in 'atom' when it's really 235 *nucleons* in nucleus. More importantly, reprocessing is not 'recycling', as it still leaves all the long- and short-lived fission products. It is a common process in Europe at least, and is used to recover plutonium for bombs anyway.
As someone whose PhD research is on corrosion mitigation in molten salt for pyroprocessing viability, it's absolutely DELIGHTFUL to see this information being distributed to the world. I love seeing someone (almost) as excited as me about the future of used fuel recycling!
And what about all the waste that is NOT the fuel? How do we store THAT for 100, 000 years? And what about accidents like Japan, Russia, and potentially Ukraine? Last I heard 1 gram of plutonium was enough to kill every living thing on Earth. Has that changed?
Your expertise is the key that can propel the world into LFTRs and a stable climate.
@@randomgrinn In Johnny Harris' video Cleo explains how fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas kill (associated deaths to workers and people in all related disasters) significantly more people than nuclear energy in relation to the amount of energy they produce.
Also another comment mentions Thorium reactors that use a thorium-plutonium fuel mixture. I don't know much about this method, but it seems to be a a solution to your other concern.
@@randomgrinn That's the thing though, we don't have to store it for hundreds of thousands of years, "merely" several centuries, which is far more manageable. Most what can't be reused, apart from the excess U238 which is both only very lightly radioactive and naturally occurring, has much lower half-life and is less radioactive as there are less of them that produce high amounts of gamma radiation, instead producing low amounts of alpha (helium cores) or beta (electrons and/or positrons) radiation, which can't reach far and would thus be much safer to handle in a casket.
As for the accidents, they are due to two things: Old, unsafe designs and using water as coolant. The old design of the power plants meant that there weren't enough failsafes and redundancies (and in case of Fukushima, putting the generator on ground level in a zone where there could a tsunami potentially knock it out; more modern designs put the generator higher up specifically to avoid it being knocked out by flooding), and using water as coolant always carries the risks of steam (and thus pressure) buildup and hydrogen generation (which can explode quite spectacularly). Future design in development use either some gas (most likely Helium, potentially Argon if there's a shortage of the former as they are very stable and non-reactive) and runs the generator at ~900°C (1650°F), which is much more efficient, or molten salt or lead, which also run a t higher temperatures and would solidify and safely bury the fuel in case of any breach.
Nuclear energy is not inherently unsafe and unsustainable, it's just using the technologies from the 70's (of which most reactors in the world are still based upon) that is unsafe. Those should gradually be replaced with newer, much safer designs and reactors that allow for either a closed cycles and/or a Thorium cycle.
Peggy stop kidding yourself this broad is much more excited about this topic than you ever will
I was trained to deal with radioactive material while in the military (part of my job) and we learned that most of the nuclear “waste” being buried was actually recyclable but that the regulations governing this were established 60+ years ago and never really undergo alteration. We need to be smarter as a society but we are too often directed by the extremes of each side of the argument.
The video really is good propaganda. Existing Tech - no ... Trow in the nuclear trash in it - noo.... Its just a regulatory issue - noooooooo...... The whole topic is so much more complex!
@@muten861 stfu can you
@@muten861 it really isn't propaganda, or you would have to label every essay about something as propaganda. The core of this video is that there is a possibility for fixing a problem and that we are not even able to discuss this because of the political climate.
@@muten861 The topic is complex, but the reason it is not discussed is the "propaganda" that has been sold to the public for the last 60 years. This should be an engineering challenge and not a political football.
@@1962Jocko thats the basic missconception on that video: it is not only the politics who makes some issues, with this tech, there is are major technology issues which must be solved.
I knew this 40 years ago. But I could never and still don't understand why it was demonised.
Money
Politiks 🤡
Both from above
3 mile island + China syndrome movie
The Left in the US had a lot of political power and celebrities like Jackson Browne opposing nuclear. By using scare tactics, they got Carter to ban it, despite Carter having the nuclear background!
Although Reagan overturned it, the damage was already done.
Think of the greenhouse gas emission that could have been saved if Democrats hadn't fought nuclear so hard.
No mention of the fact that France recycles fuel and has one of the largest commercial scale facilities.
PREACH sister! As a chemical engineer it annoys me to no end that PR failures and public idiocy have led to the downfall of one of the most useful energy resources available. If we had spent the past 5-6 decades perfecting nuclear reactors instead of legislating them into the ground we would be in SUCH a better place today in terms of LCOE (levelized cost of electricity) and emissions.
I wonder how much the popular media had to do with it. From the late 50s into the 60s it seemed that all the science fiction films, which were popular at the time, always showed us that anything nuclear did nothing but create over sized monsters. With the connection between government and social media I also wonder how much government had to do with that.
Your failures. Nuclear is the most unreliable power source ever invented, as it goes down for MONTHS at a time for refueling and maintenance. Since you're a chemical engineer, were kids in Flint poised by lead because it was radioactive, or because it was a toxic heavy metal? Kids born in Serbia, much less Iraq, are subjected to hideous birth defects by depleted uranium munitions. Your nuclear waste will be a hazard until the sun goes nova.
That's not exactly what's happened. Any systems scientist can demonstrate why nuclear is inferior to natural gas in throughput, and nuclear isn't bootstrapped; it's a hydrocarbon derivative much like hydrogen. Its entire energy input is already a much simpler fuel that can be used on demand with a faster production and lower unit cost. Electricity is already cheap and abundant.
Jevons paradox combined with market forces would only make for a product with no market value and would rapidly increase overall consumption. Declining EROEI.
Whole heartedly agree. The so called nuclear waste has a lot of very useful stuff in it. One no brainer use of it is using the cesium to make portable water purifiers where chemical means are not reliable. Several kilocuries of 137Cs as glass in a titanium or stainless tube wrapped in a copper coil of copper or stainless steel tubing would make literal pond scum into drinkable water, 24-7 365 for 75 years straight. 🤔
@@skeetorkiftwon Depends on where you're from. Electricity isn't cheap everywhere. Talking about Europe, it became quite expensive after NordStream blew up. We might've benefited from such projects, and we _were_ supposed to have nuclear plants ready for this process by 2022... but the project got canceled in a deal between the leading party and the ecologist. Freaking politics...
I’ve been following since the beginning, and am thrilled to see you having the success you deserve. Thanks for the awesome videos!!
You are a deluded sucker.
She is talking about breeder reactor technology.
Where side reactions form higher and higher mass synthetic actinides with smaller and smaller critical masses and larger releases of neutrons with every fission that transmute the Atoms of the reactor structure and body's of the workers into radionuclides.
EVERY TIME YOU "BURN YOUR NUCLEAR WASTE".!
It has NEVER been viable because predicting the chemistry and characteristics of the fuel in controlled fission becomes more and more impossible with every cycle.
It has always resulted in unexpected uncontrolled sudden explosive chain reactions.
NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS WITH UNCONTROLLED ENVIRONMENTAL RELEASE OF LARGE QUANTITIES OF HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL AT "WASTE REPROCESSING FACILITIES" IN THE US OF As, France or Britain HAVE BEEN COMMON.
AND ALMOST INVARIABLY COVERED UP FROM PUBLIC AWARENESS!
-They only ever reprocessed spent fuel for weapons grade plutonium anyway.
And the fission fragments are more and more dangerous at every repetition of the cycle.
The only advantage, if you could call it that is the potential to accumulate certain isotopes of Americium Californium and Curium that have critical masses from pinhead to marble sized and in theory could be used for nuclear fission bombs you could put in your pocket. As long as you intend to use them in less than a month, and don't mind being killed by the neutrons they release from spontaneous fissions, if you spend more than a few minutes anywhere near them.
As the half lives are a few years, spontaneous fissions thousands of times more per second than U235 or Pu239..
If you think using nuclear fuel as radioactive as polonium 210, where an amount the size of a grain of salt is sufficient to kill by radiation poisoning every human on the planet, then you are as much of an ignorant fool as THIS SCIENTIFICALLY ILLITERATE BIMBO appears to be in this video.
How thrilling! Another pretty girl with a pleasant voice talking about things that interests the millions of sex starved nerds on TH-cam made it... Id say a modicum of success is pretty much guaranteed.
@@1112viggo Wow what a cynical attitude. You are not acknowledging reality, if you think anything will be achieved without natural gifts. And if it is not looks then it will be anything else. I would say these videos are also great in many other ways other than her looks, by the way. And yes she is tremendously beautiful, but should she now lock herself away because of that, or create great content because she likes to have a life?
I would guess someone who posts a comment like that probably prides himself with his intelligence. Thats a blessing that is distributed unequally and by chance aswell.
And you might also want to consider that it is a very cheap shot to reduce a womans accomplishments only to her looks. Furthermore I think it can be considered the male counterpart to females attributing male success only to them having advantages in "the patriarchy". Both seems much too cynical.
@@flosse1993 You are misinterpreting my lack of excitement and surprise as disapproval. What ever attracts people to a video about science is a thing good in my book.
Personally i am more thrilled by someone like Sabine Hossenfelder making it big. She is for me the incarnation of no nonsense science and she actually got the age and credentials to contribute to the science, rather than simply explaining it.
@@1112viggo Well it does sound quite unfair and I'm not sure that view depends on interpretation all that much. But your second message sounds like a much fairer opinion and makes much sense. But also I would say: if her sources are solid and the resulting information is solid I think I prefer someone who is capable of conveying information skillfully and in a way that captures my attention over some amazing scientist who doesn't know how to explain anything (Had that experience in Uni alot)
As for the example you give, I can't speak to that, but of course someone who is great in their field AND comunicates great is the pinnacle and maybe deserves more attention and praise
Love your work Cleo , from an environmental engineering student.Sending eco love all the way from Tamilnadu, Chennai , India . Just so u know , India reprocesses almost all of its spent nuclear fuel (to save on imports but , its eco friendly 2! ) but anyways, we’re not stereotypical about nuclear energy like the so called “developed & educated nations “bcoz of an accident that happened decades ago (yes , I’m talking to u Germany ) . Stop lingering on the past and work towards the future . There are safer and promising nuclear solutions.
Fun fact : worlds oldest & still operating nuclear plant is in India . Up to date on safety standards , alive & kickin.’ five decades of nuclear energy , not a single accident.
That’s incredible!
Love you from Bihar, India. Also, Is anyone doing advanced reactors in our country like MSRs , SMRs ?
And what happened to the "Three stage thorium program" thing ?
Great to know this 👍☺️
Dude I'm also Indian and I want to work in nuclear energy (I'm 18 btw). Got 97%ile in jee mains :/ Advanced is next month. Anyways I'm looking for some guidance on how to enter the industry. Would it be better to do something like Electrical from BITS or environmental engineering from IISC Bangalore or Environmental from one of the top 7 IIT's.
Which college did you go to and how did you end up working in nuclear power?
Thanks for your time and Jai Hind brother :)
Germany is one of the worst example of trying to use more renewable energy. They are closing down nuclear power stations and now have to increase use of coal due to the war as they cannot keep up with energy demands with renewable energy. Politicians are all about nepotism and money unfortunately.
If you are green, you must love nuclear. If you don't, you are not.
Just a small correction of the enrichment process: It's not about making the U238 become U235 in any way. We are mining the combination of U235 (a little) and U238 (a lot), we then slowly scrape the U238 away, therefore having better ratio of U235 vs U238, but we don't make more U235. The process how to do this (very high level) is to spin it in a centrifuge and since U238 is +-238/235 times heavier, it can be separated when spinning really fast.
(Singing) You spin me right 'round, baby, right 'round/Like a centrifuge, baby, right 'round, 'round, 'round/
You spin me right 'round, baby, right 'round/Like a centrifuge, baby, right 'round, 'round, 'round
Also, it takes a lot of centrifuges to do this. I seem to remember the number 60 floating around for the Iran nuclear program, but I could be wrong. This is something that has to be done in large complexes. So, if you're thinking of enriching Uranium to make a bomb, you're not going to do this in your back yard.
Correct. She made the video simple and it is good.
@@jackielinde7568 I remember the number 3000.
7:08 The 235 part of Uranium-235 isn't the number of neutrons, its the number of nucleons.
Uranium is element 92, so it has 92 protons which balances 92 electrons.. in order for all those protons to populate the tiny nucleus it requires neutrons to bind it all together. In isotope 235, there are 235 - 92, or *143 neutrons.*
Beat me to it!
Whoops. You already mentioned it! I just posted but you got it!
But does this error take away from the message she is trying to get across? I get wanting to correct someone on making a mistake, but please think about the impact your correction is making. People might see your correction and totally dismiss the message she is trying to get across. So if her mistake is fundamentally invalidating her message please explain that with your correction. If it doesn't then make sure you point that out in your correction by saying something like "Great video, I'm glad you're getting this info out but here is a correction to something you said in the video..." Many people will come to the comments on controversial topics like this to see if there might be any glaring problems with the message that's being put forth and it sucks when a topic is unfairly invalidated by someone who just wants to point out a small issue with the video. Sometimes were just better off not saying anything if we don't want to take the time to explain ourselves.
@@mute8s The error doesn't take away but it's important to point it out. Despite being a huge fan of Cleo, the mistake made me skeptical about everything I was being presented with since it's basic knowledge within the subject.
@mute8s, Relax. If an argument can't stand minimal criticism, it wasn't a very good argument. And it's better to know the truth even if it's uncomfortable.
That being said, this is mostly a pedantic discussion.
The video is correct that the number refers to how many neutrons are in the atom. It might be MORE accurate to say it IS the number of nucleons (the number of protons + neutrons). But it's also true that the number identifies the ISOTOPE, which is what we are concerned about here and the isotope is COMPLETELY determined by the number of neutrons. So, the isotope is what matters regarding the number and the isotope is entirely determined by the number of neutrons. The ONLY reason the number of nucleons matters is because the number of neutrons in that nucleon is changing between isotopes. The number of protons is what makes it uranium. It's no longer uranium if the number of protons changes. So, we can be certain the number of protons is NOT changing and thus the number identifies how many neutrons are in the atom because the other half of the nucleon NEVER changes.
So, basically she's right. The number identifies the isotope which is determined ENTIRELY by the number of neutrons in the atom.
As always great video but I just wanted to point out a minor mistake at 7:09 : The number 235 refers to the number of nucleons (neutrons + protons) in the isotope, nut just the number of neutrons. Also uranium is an element rather than a rock.
Hey, thanks for pointing this out! I added a correction that should appear at that timestamp. Here it is too: Correction: 07:09 The number refers to the total number of nucleons (either a proton or a neutron) in the atom, not the neutrons alone. A U-235 atom contains 92 protons and 143 neutrons (an atomic mass of 235). The U-238 atom also has 92 protons but has 146 neutrons (an atomic mass of 238). I should have said these *differ* by the number of neutrons in the atom. Thanks to the commenters who pointed this out!
Really appreciate it :)
Yeah that’s right
The way I remember this is carbon-12. It has an atomic weight of exactly 12 (by definition of atomic weight), which makes no sense if it has 12 neutrons.
@@CleoAbram Thanks for the reply and correction, I am really enjoying all of your videos and am looking forward to many more to come :)
So it makes sense to the Average Joe calling Uranium a "Rock" works , because yellow cake is extracted from uranium ores. Great educational video👌
Subscribed. I have been saying this had to be possible for decades because “if it’s still radioactive, it still has energy”, all without knowing it already existed.
Hi! I'm a nuclear engineer and did my PhD research on nuclear waste recycling. I am so happy about this video! You did an amazing job explaining the nuclear fuel cycle, the history of why we don't reprocess today, and that touch of hope about how things might change. Let's hope more people get behind nuclear as a source of clean energy and as part of the solution to climate change, but only if it is deployed and distributed in an equitable and just way!
Odd. My father in law was head of atomic energy.... Worked for major firms dealing with cleaning up used nuclear fuel.... At NO POINT does he see this being viable.
He has grandchildren and is very environmentally aware....
Why does he not see what this video says is so simply there ?
Maybe I'm to stupid to get this but where in this video was there any in detail explanation how this is supposed to work?
It was shown that the nuclear waste can be recycled ... nothing new to this at all, especially if one does nothing more than to build the same type of pellets again and again. (MOX Pellets containing quite a substantial amount of Plutonium)
The "magic" that needs happening here is the different type of reactors and there was thundering silence to this in this yt-video. Just some spokespersons from a company trying to commercialise a new typ of reactors ...
Hey, just wanna know where’d you do your PhD & your degree ? I’m an environmental engineer
@@Rodickjose I bet, MIT.
After the recycled nuclear fuel can no longer drive a recycling reactor, what’s left? Nuclear waste?
My dad told me about this as a child. My uncle has worked at a similar plant working on recycling waste my whole life. It's so frustrating that the mass perception of something seems to be the main barrier to a bountiful resource. The sceptic in me wants to think that fossil fuel companies are in cahoots with the press to downplay this sort of technology so that their product is more valuable.
The skeptic in you is right, except its not so much the much maligned fossil fuel companies, as the "green" energy ones, along with China, the largest manufacturer green energy products, like solar panels. Of course, the press has a lot of genuine patsy true believers though, so not really technically "in cahoots"
That's exactly what's happening
The big sharks of this world use the public perception for their gain. That's what beeing going on, in all fronts.
People are easy to manipulate
IT is not just fossil fuel companies that constantly are against nuclear power either, the Green movement is the same way different angles.
I would actually argue the biggest push back comes from the Green movement....
I first heard of this over 20 years ago from a guest speaker when I was a college student. I have been an advocate of doing this ever since. It disgusts me the way this industry has been demonized by certain segments of our society. This demonization has been uncalled for and has unnecessarily scared the public.
its the media machine. they probably dont even have anything against nuclear power, or recycled nuclear; they just know they will profit from doing everything they can to make it look evil.. the fact is, even normal nuclear could be a reasonable and significantly better option for us for a significant time, its not as dangerous as everyone thinks it is, and when all the protocols are followed it probably on average safer than the entire coal energy chain.
Many of the problems are NIMBY, and probably the worst one was the rejection of the Yucca Mountain waste facility in the Nevada Desert - Death Valley. It might be one of the best places on earth to store the stuff in terms of safety/stability, and one of the lower population density areas on earth, other than the Australian Outback.
@@Francis-rs7zu Yes. It's not that it's been demonized by certain segments, it's that nobody wants to live near a nuclear plant. The "certain segments" never had that kind of influence. If they did, they'd have solved all kinds of environmental problems. They'd have shut down coal too.
@@YTEdy No one wants to live next to a chemical plant. No one wants to live next to a refinery. No one wants to live next to a freeway, and on and on. Communities that ARE next to a nuclear plant seldom have any issues with it. It's the hyped spreading of fear by design by never-nuclear groups that has been the problem.
@@YTEdy It would not hurt my feelings at all to live near a nuclear power plant. I think it would be awesome, especially if I could also live close to a hydropower plant.
The only question I have is: why are you using safety glasses and no suit?
Great explanation by the way
God we need more journalists like you and Johnny!
👋
This editing style is pure cancer
Just so you know, what is being reported here is exactly what the nuclear industry wants you to hear. Nothing is incorrect, but it is completely missing the real issue. Yes, we have the technology to re-process nuclear waste, but the current technology is ungodly expensive. Very few people believe it will ever be able possible to recycle our current nuclear waste in a way that is at all cost effective. Only once we have exhausted all of the mines will there be much chance for recycling to be cost effective. Basically this video is a license to allow the nuclear industry to carry on doing exactly what it is currently doing. And for reference here, this is coming from a person who is overall pro-nuclear, but wants to see nuclear done in a responsible way.
@rockets4kids France has been doing it for years, the US is against it due to fears regarding nuclear weapons.
Oh johnny is a joke after his UFO bs Thunderf00t debunked his "journalistic lens" rapidly.
Inspirational video! Hope we get the proper technology soon, not use we do this in Canada either! I have to go polish my nuclear knowledge, I thought Uranium was the very unstable atom that breaks down into stable atoms creating tons of energy and radiation, and over time when the supply of Uranium becomes smaller, the nuclear fuel doesn't create enough economical energy and has to be replaced, unless recycled.
Aye Mehdi! Can't believe I'm early and my reward is this(maybe getting a reply from you too)🤩
Hello Mr ElectrOBoom, I have a sweet handy playlist to this end
Well you just help yourself fren
All fission reactions are very dependent on density: what are the chances that a neutron thrown off from a split will hit another atom? Too dense, and you get too many cascading reactions, and everything melts down (or, in a bomb, explodes). The density is carefully planned in a fuel rod. Once enough of the fuel has split, the density is lowered to the point where the fuel is still hot, but not hot enough to run the reactor efficiently ... but there's still a lot of fuel left in the rod. Recycling is basically sifting out some of the stuff that is slowing down the reaction, and making a new rod that has the right density from what's left over.
This is close, but not quite how it works! The energy in a nuclear power plant isn’t from uranium decaying because it’s unstable, but because it gets hit by a neutron-and that decay also gives off neutrons, so you can get a chain reaction. This means you need enough U-235 that every U-235 reaction creates exactly one more-less than one and the power stops, more than one and you have a nuclear bomb. :/ Eventually, there’s not enough U-235 in the pellets to keep the number of subsequent reactions at one, and you need new fuel-but most of the U-235 is still in there, just with a bunch of other elements ‘getting in the way’. Get rid of those (see the video!) and you can carry on using the fuel. And repeat!
CANDU reactors can burn fuel very slightly longer than other reactors, but nowhere near as long as countries like France & Japan which reprocess nuclear waste. We did this so that we could use natural uranium instead of enriched uranium, but it involved "enriching" the water. Heavy water absorbs less neutrons. Burning fuel for longer is a nice byproduct.
It seems like every elementary school student has considered this concept- if nuclear waste is so dangerous, then why isn’t it still being used for energy output, only in greater quantities of waste matter..?
I assume it was an economist as you buy the rods from one supplier that also handles the pickup/transport and "disposal".. It's a monopoly because it has to be (nat. Sec./the Russians/terrorists).
In essence as these spent fuel reactors exists we kinda have to assume that not all reactors are spent fuel capable and they're not just hauling spent fuel from plant to plant 🎉
Didn't Hillary sell the uranium to Russia not all that long ago?
How much uranium is still being mined/processed every day? How many new reactors have been opened/built?
It's not a fast growing market and that one company still needs to make a profit every year..
The rods don't spend a lot of time in the cooling pools spaced further apart or moderated because they lack the ability to boil water.
In any case the Thorium reactors are far more elegant and basically can run forever, which is why they aren't used: there wouldn't be an expensive infrastructure needed to make money, it would just generate power safely and cheaply.
And then offcourse they wouldn't provide weapons grade plutonium which if I remember correctly was the primary concern when starting up the first plant in the first place. The main product wasn't electricity back then, and the amount of nuclear weapons that could be decommissioned and their payloads converted to fuel would also make nuclear a prime candidate for net zero electric because no mining would be involved
Are you human?
I would like to know what they feed the kids in your elementary schools 😁
@@mystuff9999 Rejected prison food that causes food poisioning. Also there is always that one kid.
The moment i found out about nuclear energy in elementary school, i was just obsessed with the idea of endless amounts of energy. I also realized people are more scared about Nukes instead of the actual process of creating energy with a reactor.
Just letting you know I subscribed. Retired Navy Nuclear Propulsion Plant supervisor on Submarines. We didn't invent radioactivity, there are radioactive rocks all over. We just mine them and concentrate the material to get critical mass. The waste problem is easily soluble, it just takes education
Edit: People keep commenting about the "feasibility" of this recycling process. It's obvious that those of you making this comment don't know anything about manufacturing.
Unless you are making a custom-made-to-order item or something in too low volume to keep a factory producing it, manufacturing a product is almost always done at a loss when you start. Whether we are talking about fuel rods, game consoles, or GPUs, you typically will not make a profit on a unit of sale when you first launch the product.
Let's take the PS5 Standard Edition for example. It was launched in November 2020 at a price of $499 USD. This was likely a price that resulted in a @40% loss at the time. Yes, that means each console likely cost Sony more than $800 USD to manufacture.
Why, then, did they sell the console at a loss?
Because Sony planned to make it for 5-10 years and the longer you constantly produce something in a factory the lower its manufacturing cost becomes until it eventually reaches the actual cost of the materials and labor which is always far less than the price of the item.
Sony announced that the PS5 Standard Edition would break even in June 2021. After that point, Sony would make an overall profit with each unit of sale. Something to keep in mind is that Sony was probably producing the units for a good six months to a year before the launch to have enough inventory, meaning that it took nearly two years for that model to become profitable.
This is true for nearly all products made via mass manufacturing and is called "process maturity". So, please, please, stop telling me how there's no profit to be made in this recycling process when recycling is just another manufacturing method. It's not immediately profitable, but it is over time. Big Business and Big Govt. rarely care about short-term profits when manufacturing something.
Original Post:
I remember arguing with a friend of mine over 20 years ago in HS that anything that was radioactive, including nuclear waste, could be used to generate power if we designed a plant to make use of it. Wish I had known about this place back then.
Anything radioactive, huh? How about the low level waste like a glove that has touched something radioactive and now has radioactive dust particles on it? Can you reuse that? I don't think so... the steps to separate the tiny amounts of usable fission material would require more energy than you'd get out of it. This kind of low level waste is a burden no matter what you do and it's not completely avoidable.
@@thulyblu5486 I love when people try to argue against one half of a sentence. The half you have tried to ignore is, "if we designed a plant to make use of it."
@@TheZoenGaming I didn't ignore that part. Is it feasible to design a plant to make use of such low level waste? ... I don't think so. That was the point. Disagree? Feel free to explain how that's remotely conceivable and file a patent for such a revolutionary design and expect a nobel prize in the future.
Not even joking: environmental activists would love you for solving the nuclear waste problem like this.
@@thulyblu5486 The whole point of this video is that the "nuclear waste problem" was solved more than 60 years ago. As to whether it's "feasible", by what metric are you checking? Is it feasible commercially to design and build a plant which subsumes anything that emits ionic radiation? No, not right now. Is it feasible for our and the planet's health and safety to not do so despite the economic cost? No, and it never will be.
@@thulyblu5486 Your reply is the equivalent to "I have nipples, Greg. Can you milk me?"
Nitpicking doesn't make you look intelligent. It makes you look like you're incapable of discerning an obvious generalization in a given statement. People used to be capable of having conversations with each other, without the need for "gotcha" moments. Those who insisted on doing such things were typically dismissed as obnoxious losers, who had nothing worthwhile in their lives - so they would need to get "wins" by splitting hairs.
On second thought, I guess it's still the same, today. There are just a lot more of you, now.
This is such a fun community, not much toxicity or negativity but genuine questions, discussions, honest and humble opinions, more knowledge and appreciative comments are all. And most of it is about science - tech and it's use - misuse, effects and affects, an optimist - pragmatic take on all issues related. So happy to be here as a part!
Not much negativity? I think you mean not much *_dissent_* - because it's being censored from the discussion. I scrolled way down, and all I saw was an echo chamber of technophilia.
@@paulrousseau9144tf you mean ‘technophilia’?
@@paulrousseau9144 Why do you want dissent here?
@@ericthompson3402 Ideas without dissent are ideas that have not been tested. Ideas that can withstand dissent are more likely to be true. That's actually the scientific method. 🙂
Lol, weeb comment 😜
Damn, they really hate EVERYTHING about recycling huh?
Nice try...you can recycle many things if you are willing to pay $$$$ for your electricity.
@@tim6405y I’ve heard of how recycling actually causes a lot more money than just throw them away and create new trash for the product. But the fact that remain is companies would list their products container“recyclable” just to have an excuse to create more trash, that’s where I came from for my comment.
This video is the nuclear industry trying to greenwash their forever toxic waste by claiming it can be recycled. It is very cynical. I'm sure your are for recycling :)
its mostly because of the fear of nuclear power in general. we should have way more than we do now but don't because of the plants that exploded due to human error and freak accidents. Not only that but Hollywood demonizes it so much. Windmills and other "green" energies still does some harm and we cant soley rely on them because its not at a constant.
Its has nothing to do with "hate" its expansiv and unsafty
What people fail to realize about nuclear waste, is that it’s radioactivity decreases exponentially over time. While it will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, it isn’t deadly/dangerous to humans for that entire period of time. After about 400 years it’s safe enough to hold for hours at a time without serious exposure.
Still a long period in human terms, but a far cry from what most people think when they hear “100,000 years”
Here are some key takeaways:
1. There is a type of nuclear reactor, first built in 1962, that can generate electricity from nuclear waste. This suggests nuclear waste could be an energy resource rather than just radioactive trash needing storage.
2. There is enough nuclear waste in the US alone to power the country for the next 150 years if utilized, according to nuclear energy experts. Reusing the waste reduces radioactivity and storage needs.
3. Most nuclear waste today is stored in dry casks for decades. But the recycled waste only needs storage for hundreds of years instead of hundreds of thousands of years.
4. In 1977, President Carter banned reprocessing and recycling used fuel due to nuclear proliferation concerns. This entrenched light water reactors in the US.
5. Other countries like Japan continued reprocessing and recycling. The US ban was lifted in 1981 but economics favored the status quo.
6. Economics and access to cheap uranium diminished incentives to recycle. But with more focus on clean energy and supply chain issues, there is renewed interest.
7. If nuclear waste recycling can be commercialized, it would demonstrate the ability for humanity to overcome fears, change course, and use technology optimistically.
You missed one: the woman doesn't understand what the "235" in U-235 refers to.
@@morpheus6749 Shes clearly not an expert but a journalist. She made a mistake, its fine.
🎉 Is there renewed interest in thorium reactors? There was 13:54 no further development since the early 1960s because used fuel could not be used to make weapons.
Tell me, why if these highly dangerous substances can give free energy for hugh amount of people for 150 years, why isn't it used. And can you tell me how many years it is that these nice substanses could be released out into the nature?
@@niravapurv4578 I think the answer is in your question: because they are highly dangerous. What do you mean by "released out into nature"? If it's enriched and highly radioactive nuclear fuel then it's not safe for anyone in nature for several hundred years or even thousands depending on what exactly are you going to release.
I had a scout leader in the early nineties who was an active lobbyist for this exact topic and he explained it in detail to us young men. Having this information I decided to explain my new found knowledge to my dad who actually worked for Argonne at the Idaho national labs. He let me have my say but then proceeded to tell me that this was old news and what they were exited about was the nuclear reactor that they had just completed. The one which they could safely walk around the core. He told me that they demonstrated it to a group of officials and told them that it was impossible to melt down and they begged them not to try. It did not melt down. This was supposed to be the future of nuclear energy and they were willing to license and outsource the technology to the rest of the world. Yeah, and then the politicians got involved… again
oil companies got involved, because if it was just about politicians, then the reasonable ones would win eventually. but when you have people with too much power that would lose A LOT then you can be sure they will manipulate the playing field as much as they can so it doesn't happen. lobbying and fear mongering propaganda is the reason safe nuclear technologies are not more widespread, not democracy.
greed - the problem is greed.
Politics doesn't stop commercially viable technology.
@@SunShine-xc6dh it does, through improper implementation of regulations. Nuclear is by far one of the safest forms of energy generation, and the absurd ever changing safety expectations the government imposes just make it prohibitively expensive, expectations that come into law through lobbing. those regulations are not there to make nuclear safer and properly implemented as regulations should, they are there so fossil fuels are more attractive to investors.
oil, gas and coal are a LOT more dangerous for people living closer to it than nuclear, by a LARGE margin, and yet, it doesn't have not even a fraction of the regulations nuclear have, even though things like more efficient generators with better exhaust filtration and carbon capture technology could save millions of lives, we don't see any government forcing them to implement any of it.
@@SunShine-xc6dh And aint nothing more viable than burning natural gas an unwanted side product of oil drilling.
It's so crushing to hear those optimistic old transmissions and see where we are now. Those people had so many dreams. I find my self thinking of what could have been, if not for some key individuals. This video almost felt like the optimist takes of the old days. Loved it. Thank you very much.
I remember being at school and seeing a video about the first nuclear power station to operate in our country, soon after it was switched on. We were told that nuclear power would generate electricity that would be so cheap there wouldn't be any point in metering it. Decades later we're sticking wind farms in the sea and covering acres of potentially productive land with solar panels - with no idea how to deal with them when they stop working in 20 years - when we could have had safe (yes!), reliable, cheap (but not free!) electricity from nuclear technology if Green scaremongers hadn't got to the politicians and frightened them into regulating the industry almost to death.
You'll likely miss this comment, but I felt so moved by this video to have to reach out.
In the 3rd and 4th grade, I really enjoyed reading books on alloys and nuclear fission. Nuclear power always fascinated and excited me, but as I got older I started to learn about the dangers and tragedies surrounding it.
Today, I have both a BA and MA in linguistics, but never stopped being interested in STEM, especially surrounding nuclear power, materials engineering, and organic chem. This video sparked that same joy I felt when reading my first book on nuclear fission in my elementary school library. Thank you for that!
Subscribed :)
I worked on the construction of THORP (Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plan). Originally, there were going to be two of them. Only one was constructed. The intention was to separate plutonium from spent fuel. Over 9,000 tonnes of spent fuel was reprocessed, from 9 different countries.
Unfortunately, there was a time when the QA was falsified. Then, there was a leak, which was contained. The reasons behind THORPs perceived failures & THORPs closure, which include global & domestic political interference, make for a fascinating story.
My comment here over simplified everything.
I used to use your 'How the Internet Works' video to teach computer science at a UK secondary school made before this channel was started, so I am glad to have bumped into you again. I certainly just learned something! This would make so much more sense as one of the fears of nuclear energy is literally the problem of handling waste. If we can turn that waste into more usable fuel, then it would make a huge difference.
I love how positive and excited you are when covering these serious and important issues. You make me feel like humanity still has a bright future.
an especially bright future with nuclear power ⚛☢
I hope sentient AI judges humanity on people like her.
@@googlekonto2851 Super bright if WW3 is nuclear! :)
Seems a bit over the top acting to me, but as long as she makes truthful videos it's good..
@@Marqan some people are just naturally enthusiastic like this. If it helps other young people get interested and more educated in topics like this then I am all for it.
45th year in commercial nuclear power. Done just about everything I could in different roles at the plants including licensed senior Reactor operator. In my last phase now as consultant on the design team for a small modular reactor. Civilian nuke from the merchant marine. I've found that the nuke industry has some of the most dedicated, bright, creative, hard working people I've ever had the honor of working with and establishing friendship with. Keep the core covered!
I enjoyed the video. Perhaps a future topic could be about how we're failing to use the abundant "waste" of thorium-232 to create fissile uranium-233 to be used in highly efficient fluid-fuel breeder reactors (like the LFTR). Once again, these technological concepts were proven to work back in the 60's, but development of the thorium fuel cycle in the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) was halted in favor of fast breeder reactors that could produce weapons-grade Plutonium-239.
Romans 10:9 = Eternal life
1 John 5:3
“For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous.”
Ecclesiastes 12:13
“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.”
Because it's cheap and effective. Low pressure salt reactors are a fraction of the cost of traditional reactors.
Just a note.. as someone who has worked for several years in the nuclear power sector in the US.. not all nuclear waste is the recyclable ’spent fuel rods’.
There is plenty of additional ‘low level’ radioactive waste that is made up of contaminated materials created (for example) during maintenance activities and fluids that have become contaminated. These are most likely not recyclable and do represent a long term burden to the country.
Geoff..,you are correct. The French ran the most efficient nuclear program in the world and recycled and even bred fuel? But now after their old reactors need to be decommissioned they are being crushed under the burden of all the low level nuclear waste. What people fail to realize that even after a couple hundred years after the spent fuel is cooled off and not nearly as high level radioactive waste, this low level waste is the most dangerous because all the new created fission isotopes are more dangerous than the original low level radioactive fresh fuel...because they're all readily absorbed and spread throughout the environment and must be stored to prevent this for hundreds of thousands of years. This is the deadly part if it all.
@Mr. Richard C. It is much more dangerous because it is a witches brew of radioactive isotopes not found naturally in coal. The mercury in coal is more of a concern than the isotopes in coal
What's the story with Yuma Mountain?
@@gb-jg1ud .. agreed.. this dimension is seldom discussed, but I feel it needs to be far better appreciated.
@@gb-jg1ud Good example. And to me it's like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. We need solid solutions for dealing with all the waste, not this high level marketing campaign from the nuclear power lobbies telling us it will be safe, trust us...
We need more quality communicators like you to promote engineering - this is real quality work.
The only thing which kind of nobody mentions about nuclear energy, is the incredible high cost in comparison to sun, wind, water or geo energy 🤷♂️ reused nuclear energy would be great but if it's even more expensive than the one time usage, it's wasted time and money🤷♂️
@@maddinek it’s not more expensive. You can’t compare base load with intermittent supply which requires storage or back up.
@@teryd5672n actually, i didnt. it was mentioned in the video.
@@maddinek best to be a little sceptical of what you read/hear. Maybe I am biased due to my profession, but in my view it is the only practical means of getting any near to net zero in next 50 years.
"quality communicators" I hate how people will rather listen to "quality communicators" who are not even old enough to have taken the education required to work in the field of science being explained. Its like choosing to listen to an 18 year old Greta Thunberg rather than someone who´s been working 8 years to become a climatologist and another 4 to publish his paper.
I wish I had seen this video before. I always assumed that it should be possible to re-use nuclear waste, but not being an expert, never dove into it. So thanks for doing this and share it. You have one of the best science channels on YT, I think, please keep up the excellent work and make the world a little smarter!
Instant Sub.
I love when a subject is "Objectively" researched and presented in a positive manner. So many subjects are "SCARY" and people do not want to even discuss them due to their own inherent bias. Thank you!
That's because objective facts help no looter party to coerce you.
you need that safe space, reality is too scary for you and call it bias stating facts without the sugar coating.
Here's a fact: Nuclear waste will be the death of this planet. Any other opinion is misinformed.
@@libertariantranslator1929 Let's be honest, lefties are the problem here because if climate change was solved with nuclear power, there wouldn't much room left to solve it with a tyrannical soc ial ist government, which has always been their real goal.
The issue is never about the actual issue, that's why their solutions are never anything other than more socialism. They're not environmentalists, they're watermelons... green on the outside but red on the inside.
I am amazed at the ability of Cleo to explain technology in an understandable yet sophisticated way. Her videos are a pleasure to listen to.
Yes, but this one is one-sided. It focuses only on the vision. If you look more clearly, you see that there still is no solution for low-level waste and that the necessary reactors are the higher risk ones. Check out Detroit's history :-)
Oh Shut up!!!
Yes, "amazing". Amazingly WRONG. Case in point: the 235 in U-235 is *NOT* the number of neutrons in the uranium atom, as she casually spews out at 7:07 in an authoritative voice. 235 is the number of protons *PLUS* the number of neutrons in the nucleus. If you knew basic physics you would have understood what a whopper of a fackup this is to have in a "science" video. But judging by the fact that you have to get your science from a Saturday morning cartoon, this is clearly far beyond your understanding, and you will therefore swallow any piece of garbage as "ability to explain technology" and get amazed by it. I would suggest reading a book or two, but I highly doubt that is within your ability.
I am tickled to learn there are more of them.
She is some kind of a magician! I love her.
Just discovered this channel. This video is AMAZING. Informative, inspiring, perfect length and well researched. Cleo, you're doing wonderful work here. Thank you.
Cleo is awesome definitely subscribe, sad to see she's not at 1MM yet
Everyone's talking about how journalism is dying and I'm like "nah, it just moved to youtube, it's the institutions that are dying not journalism itself"
When I was a kid, I always wondered why it wasn’t couldn’t be recycled, which was pretty much what we were told.
You learn new things every day and this was definitely new for me
In the early days of my career I was in the Nuclear power industry. I was taught that the best thinking was a single Turbine floor in the center of several reactor vessels. Design life was limited to 40 years at that time. (I believe they have extended that to more like 40-60 years.) Based on the reactor build time the first reactor would be started up. Followed by a second reactor starting after start up of the first. With 8 reactors the fuel removed from the reactor at the end of life is sent for recycling. The first reactor is rebuilt 300 years from now allowing for radioactive cool down before humans need to do the work. While I am no longer in the industry, at that time the NRC said no you can not do that, you have to return the land to its original state. The costs were very high and with TMI and Chernobyl nuclear power died, as far as new plants were concerned. Even existing plants have trouble getting fully qualified parts. The nuclear industry fell apart here in the US with no demand to cost justify maintaining Qualifications.
Cost to clean up the spent fuel would run in the trillions and it needs done. Is this the first step to the second question below?
The one question that I have not researched is were did it come from to begin with and can we return it to its original state and just put it back? I know the environmentalist would say no to putting a natural material that is from the earth back into the earth. I am sure there is still unmined Uranium in the earth.
Separate food for thought - Thorium reactors have been toughted as fuel that would not run away. While radioactive it would cool down with a power loss to the plant.
My thought was that Admiral Rickenbacker (No Dis-respect admiral if my spelling is off) was shown Uranium and Thorium and picked Uranium to power the navy and make nuclear devices.
I wish more people talked about LFTR (liquid flouride-thorium reactors) more often!
Thorium reactors are considered sustainable reactors, since the actual fuel, plutonium, is created in the process entirely within the reactor. It's created, and consumed in one place, which mitigates risk of nuclear materials dealings, and the designs are such that the systems maintaining the reaction aren't preventing overloading, but instead preventing it suffocating itself with neutron poisoning.
Like instead of having a fire and you control it by cooling off the stuff near it it's a fire that requires you keep actively providing it with oxygen.
So if secondary power or systems fail, they fail to a condition where the reaction kills itself.
The designs are amazing.
A bonus is that almost all the real waste is either very short half life or extremely long making it easy to dispose of. Highly radioactive stuff isn't radioactive long, so you can store it securely for just weeks, and the other stuff is in the realm of natural background radiation.
@@thekwoka4707 All nuclear power plants since RBMK design failure are self limiting, self failing reactor designs. ALL commercial designs use a negative temperature coefficient (temp goes up, reaction rate goes down); but as with anything, everything can fail lol. Its not that the "Reaction kills itself"; its "how fast". lol
@@TheeSeniorJr LFTRs are overrated and offer no actuall advantage over conentional reactors with the Pu cycle
So in spite of how stupid all that was, and in spite of the fact that only 3% of the potential energy was used before the fuel was discarded, what do you know about why the molten salt thorium reactor was scrubbed when it was so much safer and had no fuel waste issues?
7:09 "The number refers to the Number of Neucleons of the atom" not Neutrons. Cause U-235 and U-238 means Uranium with those masses. Just a small correction which might be slipped through post production.
Thanks for the amazing video.
The experts in the KIT in Karlsruhe told me this when I attended my radiation protection course.
They said, the only problem with the recycling process is that the same equipment which enables you to recycle nuclear waste can be used to build material for nuclear bombs.
Not an issue for the US but for a country which is not yet capable to do so, it is a problem. A political problem.
Yeah. At the point where she said that she had to prove her US citizenship and wasn't allowed to film inside, she should have mentioned the problem of national security and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. If you can recycle Uranium 235 from spent fuel, you can also get the weapon's grade Plutionium.
To be fair, she mentioned Jimmy Carter's ban but she made it look like an anecdote instead of explaining the gravity of the topic in full scale.
And still there's the bottom line: It's cheaper to burn "fresh" Uranium instead of recycled Uranium. And if you're ready to invest more money in more expensive recyceled fuel then why not invest that money in renewably energy where you don't have to consider fuel cost at all?
Imagine other countries in the world doing this. The US would outright threaten them with war if they did. The video skipped over a lot of downsides making it sound like they are just an inconvenience. Political issues. Issues with managing and storing plutonium. The fact that there is a lot of nuclear waste that are not spent fuel rods ...
So, without getting into too many details here, just having the material to build a weapon doesn't give you the ability to do so. There is a LOT involved, which is why you don't see rogue nukes popping up everywhere. If a nation really wants nukes and is willing to pay the cost, there is little anyone can do to stop them short of military action. And there is absolutely nothing stopping a nation from operating nuclear power plants and processing spent fuel for plutonium. Many countries reprocess fuel already.
Oh, yeah, that would be a problem when other countries can’t be invaded by the US because they have nuclear weapons. A big problem indeed!
It's a problem because the US *thinks* that they (and their friends) are the only ones responsible/smart/privileged enough to be allowed to have nuclear weapons.
Just discovering this series. So informative, thought provoking, and easy to enjoy. I look forward to these on my coffee breaks. The topics are also very interesting, keep them coming Cleo, you are doing a great job!
Great video! I’m a Nuclear Operator at Hanford Nuclear Reservation and this would solve so many issues of storage of nuclear waste and should be implemented as soon as possible!
Excellent video. Now do one on LFTRs; this stands for Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors. These reactors were also developed at Argonne national laboratories. Many benefits to LFTR reactors including vastly reduced nuclear waste and most of it does not last ten thousand years, much reduced physical foot print because there's no need to contain a steam explosion, and finally, what the public loves, is the nuclear reaction inherently cannot cause a meltdown. American Scientist had a very informative article on them written by Dr Hargraves.
There is no advantage of a LFTR over a uranium MSR breeder. Actually uranium MSRs are cheaper and easier to build and have all the same advantages.
The main advantage for LFTRs that I'm aware about is that thorium is extremely abundant and is currently treated as a waste material by most mining operations. If we could build viable LFTRs, then we'd be able to turn those waste piles into energy. The main issue that I'm aware of is that the molten liquid salt is highly corrosive; and has been in need of some advances in material science before they can be made viable. On the MSR vs LFTR issue, my opinion is that humankind would be better off if both were in an easily commercializable state. More arrows in our technological quiver, as it were.
Same problem as with waste fuel. Too expensive. Both these technologies were developed when we thought we'd have a shortage of uranium. But then we found more uranium deposits and the cost of manufacturing new fuel crashed (because all the plants had already been built). As such there was no economic incentive to use Thorium or waste fuel. Some countries like India, China and Japan which don't have significant domestic sources of uranium might consider it as a national security thing, but other than that there is little incentive.
@@veergauba Incorrect, prepping waste fuel pellets for molten salt fast breeder reactors is cheap and you only have to do it once. Turning it back into solid pellets as described in this video is expensive and has to be done over and over.
Agreed. We might have had these reactors in use for decades had it not been for the political efforts of Nixon to shut down that project.
U 235, refers to the atomic mass (number of protons and neutrons) and not the number of neutrons. Isotopes of same element have different number of neutrons.
Shes just a science communicator. Have some leniency
The element is determined by the number of protons. The Isotope number is a combination of the protons and neutrons. Therefore, the difference between U-235 and U-238 is entirely a difference in neutrons. She just skipped to the end without going through all the details.
@@DarkLordSparky Time 7:10 she said:
The number refers to the number of neutrons in the atom.
I get that youre a fan having your white knight moment, but cmon. Dont defend stuff you know isnt right
@@de0509 I agree she should have said "the difference in the numbers relates to the number of neutrons" but that is really splitting hairs in a layperson video, like this one.
Great video, Iove learning about revolutionary tech. You've made it so interesting as well. By the way, I think there's a small mistake in the video. The 235 in uranium 235 refers to the relative atomic mass which is the no. of protons and (average) no. of neutrons added together.
You've become one of those channels that I drop everything I'm doing when I see a new video dropped. There's only 4 other channels. Boston Dynamics, The Physics Girl, Smarter every day, and Tom Scott.
also... Bright.
Go and offer good wishes and hope to Diana.
@@markbernier8434 I do regularly, and monthly on patreon.
Hi, Cleo. Just got across a few of your videos, and I must say they’re among the best on YT. Interesting topics, deep research, referenced sources, cool images and editing, and on top a very charming presenter. Congratulations to you and your team for putting this up.
I just had a discussion yesterday with a coworker who pushed back when I referred to the fear of nuclear power as “irrational.” I’m looking forward to sharing this video and your channel with him.
The fear itself isn't irrational, most reactor designs can be hugely dangerous in the wrong circumstances, and our weather gets more unpredictable and more extreme each year, it seems. Additionally for profit companies can't be trusted to handle waste in a way that is not harmful to people and/or the environment. However, I have seen plenty of irrational fear about anything nuclear.
@@politesociety I wonder how did they disassembled first nuclear Chicago Pile-1 ( uranium fuel became very radioactive after brought to criticality)
Statistically it's irrational BUT...... when it goes wrong it goes VERY wrong, and renders large areas uninhabitable for thousands of years. I think the people of Ukraine, the East Urals, and Japan would not agree that the fear is irrational. Some smaller scale incidents like Windscale, Sellafield, and Three Mile Island were lucky escapes. We should not forget that.
Given the energy companies are putting all their research and development budgets into renewables now it's doubtful any of them will revert to old tech reactors which are massively expensive to build and maintain. Nuclear has had its day.
@@woopimagpie Nuclear is the future, it is the only real good working solution. The only problem with nuclear energy production is bad planning, bad policies, and bad safety mechanism. Every nuclear disaster that has happened would have been completely avoided if the right people spent more time planning, making good safety policies, and made better safety mechanisms.
@@woopimagpie I have reliable sources in Australia where apparently the modelling doesn't show that Nuclear could get up and running soon enough to be competitive against renewables. Though we don't have any existing infrastructure, and our ability to generate from renewables is quite good. I imagine it'd be a different situation elsewhere like America.
I do still low key want to live in the atomic future envisioned in the 50's and 60's.
Interestingly I read that Japan reversed its nuclear pause last year due to the energy shortages due to Ukraine.
Thank You Cleo! I'm a Nuclear professional (retired) who has tried to explain this my whole life, but you did a better job in 15 minutes!
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I had a relative who was involved with nuclear engineering that worked on a project to create commercial versions of these 'garbage reactors' and watched that work get halted by President Carter's nuclear policies. You have touched briefly on all the major key points I'm aware of. The biggest point of attack from anti-nuclear groups is the talk of cost and arguing that dollars spent on new reactors is dollars not spent on renewables.
Hopefully more media like this will help break down the barriers and help us find the will to explore this maligned form of energy production as a means to move us away from fossil fuels faster.
Did every other country in the world also get halted by Carter. Conspiracy theories fall apart if you realize that there are other countries in the world that also don't build "garbage reactors"
Cleo, I LOVE the insight you bring to this topic - and frankly, to all topics that you cover. My wife and I found your channel through your collaboration with Johnny Harris just last week, jumped around in your back catalog, and subscribed. I love the work being done by a lot of independent videojournalists and educators doing in-depth explainers on interesting topics - CGP Grey, Johnny Harris, UsefulCharts, The B1M, Stewart Hicks, Wendover Productions, Real Engineering, SciShow, MinuteEarth, Nonstop Dan, Extra History, Howard Ho, Kurzgesagt, etc., but while they are all great, and they have all taught me fascinating things that I didn't know, I don't think any of them have successfully challenged my thinking on topics as they explore them the way you do in nearly every video. You are not just one among many explainers on TH-cam, you are THE BEST on TH-cam at this. I'm so glad I've found your channel - keep it up, I look forward to finishing your back catalog and all of your future work!
This has been done for over 40 years in the UK at a re processing plant near Blackpool. It does not make money in the conventional sense but is deemed to 'save' money as storing nuclear waste is very expensive. This plant has reprocessed spent fuel from many parts of the world including Japan.
No this is totally different.
Micha Egi is right. The tech described in the video is the electrochemical or pyroprocessing fuel recycling developed originally for the Integral Fast Reactor at ANL/INL and doesn't produce a pure Pu stream like the PUREX tech used in the UK & France. It basically electroplates all the minor actinides along with the Pu and significant amounts of U as well into a single stream. Much safer from a proliferation perspective and should be cheaper, although that is yet to be proven commercially.
@@richardbaird1452 Thanks for the clarification, although I wouldn't call that 'totally different'. At the level of this video, the point is that fuel rods are only 1-4% used and reprocessing is an existing technology it would make a lot of sense to use. The details of the reprocessing tech are a relatively minor matter, although you are right that methods with lower proliferation risk are more likely to succeed.
Which is good because the worldwide record of fast reactors/breeders has been 'chequered', with the French closing theirs in 1998, the US building one and never turning it on (IIRC?), the Japanese building one but shutting it down quite quickly and the UK closing Dounreay in 1977. Only the Russians are still running commercial-scale fast breeders (BN-600, BN-800) (pity they've made themselves pariahs recently - they might have been able to sell us all fast breeders). Although I see from world-nuclear.org's 'fast reactor' page that there is a Chinese reactor under construction now too.
I hope this goes viral or you get more popular.
Your videos are great
Cost has got to stop being a reason to not do things. We HAVE GOT TO fix this world. This kind of in-depth reporting is what will help us get to the end-point we need.
Really well done Cleo!! ❤
We can still use cost, the problem is that we are not accounting for the future cost of all of the externalities of foaisle fuels. We must use the lifetime cost rather than the current cost to make our decisions.
Agree. The US national debt is 31 trillion dollars right now. How much nuclear recycling could have been accomplished if we'd spent the money more wisely? How much more energy independent would we be at this stage?
Cost never stopped the good ole US of A from raging war. It's all about power and greed. The people with the money and the power will generally only do what they feel will sustain or increase their money/power.
Unfortunately it is a lot of the reason why we don't do things. The same reason why plastic recycling isn't successful and metal recycling is so successful, money. Metal recycling is so profitable whereas plastic isnt.
@@themasstermwahahahah then you are basically against capitalism, where the only numbers that matter are the here and now. Quarterly profit margins are sacred, whatever happens tomorrow or a thousand years from now is SEP (Somebody Else's Problem).
Cleo you're so underrated. Thank you for a channel that is so optimistic about the future. With the huge amounts of news we get these days and how we often see all the bad on our feeds, videos like these are so refreshing. Currently my fav channel!
I have designed many machines over the years and always found the greatest obstacle comes from those at the top. Their focus is on their life and not their descendants. This mind set needs to change before anything else and move forward.
@@Bob-lq6dt Yes, that sums up nuclear power well: short term gain with long term consequences.
their focus is on how much money they can get out of it at least the politicians
came from Harris on a nice Sunday documentary binge... crazy how accurate the algorithm can be. Your good, nice storyline, well executed. Johnny's transitions felt a little more poppy... but that's subjective. Subscribe lol.
@ 13.02 "...we just need to commercialize it." Current projections in the nuclear industry suggest breeder technology could be effectively commercialized by 2050. That's WAY too late to be any use against climate change. But it'll work fine for proliferation in the meantime. "We just need to commercialize it" is actually a really big problem.
Cleo is just one more nuke shill who identifies with power and is without any concept of radiation biology.
I was always skeptical about nuclear power upto like 6 months ago. I've been rethinking it ever since. One of my biggest concerns was the nuclear waste. I kept asking friends, and even a state representative here in Illinois who is pro-nuclear, when I asked him about the nuclear waste aspect of it, he didn't have a comforting answer. I don't think he knows about this process, because he didn't even hint at it, or he simply hid it well. He simply said, "yes it's a problem, and we don't know yet..." That was after he told me, Illinois was building 2 additional plants... so you could only imagine how I felt about it... a friend of mine, about a year ago, briefly mentioned that nuclear waste can be reused, but that was as much as he said... so I'm glad I did a TH-cam search on the subject. I find this 17 minute answer much more clarifying, and comforting. Now I have to sit and think what other doubts I might have about nuclear energy, but as of right now, I have none. Thanks.
I highly recommend looking into Nuclear Thorium reactors. They cut down on the amount of waste drastically. Plus Thorium is much more abundant than Uranium. Why hasn't this been used you ask? Because they can't use to make bombs and the decision in the US was initially made to make bombs.
@@NorthgateLP
"Nuclear Thorium..." can't say I've ever heard of it... will definitely look it up.
@@Jmaters83 Its gonna be used heavily in india, because they have a lot of thorium. Did you find a video regarding nuclear thorium in english? Please tell me, if you did.
@@Jmaters83 Thorium is neutron transformed into Pa-233 which decays into U-233. It's just another Uranium isotope in the end with waste containment and storage costs.
@@WaryofExtremes That is sort of the beauty and terrible nature of capitalism. Far before we run out of uranium, the cost to buy and enrich uranium will balance and finally surpass the cost of recycling as uranium becomes less plentiful and recycling costs go down through innovation. At that point, we will begin to bring out the old uranium and recycle it. We have fixes in place for the dangers of the plutonium that would be gathered too called down-blending. It will be done, just not yet.
As someone who knows next to nothing about this stuff, recycling nuclear waste always seemed like it should be a thing…
“We have too much of this dangerous stuff and not enough energy!”
“What’s dangerous about it?”
“It gives off too much energy!”
“If we used that energy, would it be less dangerous?”
“Yes, of course!”
“…”
yup. that is why they designed new reactors to use the spent fuel from old reactors .
it is real, and there already are functioning reactors that are running on waste from old reactors
It is a thing. I'll give you an example. Most nuclear reactors need ENRICHED URANIUM for them to work in a reactor. That means, you need to boost the amount of actual uranium in the fuel bundle in order for the reactor to start up. Once that % of uranium is below a certain level, it is spent fuel and unusable FOR THAT REACTOR. HOWEVER, if you have a heavy-water moderated reactor - like the Canadian CANDU reactor, that reactor design allows you to use NATURAL uranium - no enrichment needed. Why is this the case? Because the heavy water used in the reactor, is such an efficient moderator of the neutrons that are emitted by the fuel for the chain reaction to start, you don't need as much uranium to get the reaction started. The cool thing is, that not only can you use natural uranium, (no enrichment) the reactor can also use thorium and plutonium and, get this, the SPENT FUEL of other reactors.
China, or example purchased from Canada, a CANDU reactor. What the Chinese do is take the spend fuel from their regular nuclear reactors and feed their CANDU with the spent fuel, to get more electrical power out of it. The CANDU design has other benefits - it can also REFUEL WHILE RUNNING - the only reactor design in the world that does this. The French recently hd problems with their reactors having to go offline - mostly because they had to refuel. Not a problem with CANDU, and that's why CANDU reactors hold many of the world records in continuous operation. Add to that, the fuel pellets that that company Cameco makes for the reactors is mixed in a ceramic - almost like a glass - so when the fuel is fully used up, all of the radioactive elements are encased in the ceramic - no leaking to groundwater if you decide to bury it for long term storage.
Finally, because radioactivity is ENERGY, if you leave the radioactive materials in water, you will naturally get hydrogen produced. Hello, HYDROGEN. Hydrogen that can go into a fuel cell. Hydrogen that can be burned in a hydrogen combustion motor.
Many activists are just CLUELESS of the engineering that can be done to make all of this possible. Seriously, we just need to let the engineers do their jobs, and ignore the activists in this case - they have no viable solutions, they have not done the math, and those countries that went crazy with solar/wind (Germany), they have major power bills because despite building 200% of what they need in capacity, solare and wind only deliver 49% of what they need. They spent anywhere between 500 BILIION EURO to a whopping 2 TRILLION Euro. If 500 Billion where spend in nuclear - every German household and company could heat their building with electricity, dry clothes with electric, cook food with electric, and still have power left over to SELL to other countries. And that power is 24/7/365.
From what i can tell is the reason we dont do it. Is because internationally it will make other countrys realize that they should do nuclear power and the concern is this will create nuclear weapons for thous countrys and so we cant have nice things.
There are companies that recycle nuclear waste for reuse in nuclear reactors. However, based off my limited knowledge, apparently recycled fuel becomes no longer economically viable after the second time it's used. So while useful, it's use is still nonetheless limited. And as Joe stated above, nuclear energy is still better than wind and solar. Germany in all of its environmental genius has caused an increase in deaths in its local population due to restarting coal plants after realizing that solar and wind was shockingly insufficient to meet its energy needs. Oh yeah they are also buying nuclear power from France which is pretty silly.
@@letsstudyquantum wrong in every way possible... I can't even begin to describe how wrong this is. If you actually watched the video you'd know that other countries are ALREADY doing this. Nuclear power fuel is nowhere near the requirements for nuclear bomb weapons. Also almost every other country in the world has nuclear power plants and had them for AGES.
Thank you for this video. I'm an engineer, and i didn't know this. It doesn't shock me that the barriers to implementation have been political, and not technical. Let's hope this pushes ahead.
Very interesting. It's something we need to explore reviving.
A few decades back, I regularly visited Argonne because I sold them imaging instruments for doing X-ray crystallography. It's was a lot easier to get in pre 9/11. Also, the original Argonne site is about 3.5 miles east of the current facility in Red Gate Woods Forest Preserve. The early research reactors are buried there. They used to be fenced off, but it was determined they don't pose a danger to hikers, so the fence was removed and interpretive signs were added. Back when the Manhattan Project started, it was really remote.
And finally, I think Johnny bears a strong resemblance to Toby Maguire, who had an interesting encounter with a radioactive spider in one of his movies.
I remember reading about this like forever ago, when I was still a teenager and being like, "wait, what?!". Funny seeing your exact same reaction 🤣 Great video. It's the public perception of what nuclear power represents that is SO flawed. Hard to see it changing given the rampant ignorance of seemingly everyone
"How the US poisoned Navajo Nation"
It's a big giant dumb kettle using 80 year old technology to boil water which produces the most toxic by product in the universe whose real purpose was to make nuclear bombs. There are easier, better, cheaper, cleaner ways to make electricity now. If you can't see that then maybe you are the ignorant one.
The same happend to me when my physics teacher explained it to us in school 25 years ago.
this is called MOX reprocessing or "mixed oxide" fuel, and it's certainly not a silver bullet. Japan had to get the reprocessing perfomed in France and the worst thing you can do with high level waste is move it around. Nuclear energy is worth pursuing for sure, but it's currently the most expensive possible way to make power, and reprocessing only make that cost higher. It's technically viable for sure but then so is Fusion. more research needed for both, and LFTR thorium.
There is nuclear reacor called bn-800 (fast neutron reactor 800 MegaWatt ), which is working on 100% MOX-fuel for almost a year already. And procedures of reprocessing MOX-fuel for that type of reactors are already at industrial production scales
Japan is working on getting its own reprocessing facility online. I agree that in terms of cost it’s not really worth reprocessing for somewhere like the US with reliable partners with plenty of uranium like Canada. But for energy deprived countries like Japan that treats nuclear energy as a part of their national security, reprocessing makes a lot of sense!
always the money, eh. Isnt the clean part worth it? The material in a motorbike helmet costs maybe 5 bucks in mass, but you still pay hundreds because your head is worth it
@@fetB try to explain that to our capitalistic system eh
Thanks for this info, I hope we'll do it to reduce the long-term storage risk at least and get some power out of it as well.
Just subscribed, but I love your videos. Keep up the good work making us all more informed about the most interesting subjects. I am a fan!
Hi cleo i know you are gonna see this cause you'll be hanging around for some time here after uploading... just wanna say thanks for educating us on such important topics and cheers to your awesome work... keep up the good work
As a scientist, I find your videos super clear and to the point, even when explaining some very complicated concepts. You're a fantastic storyteller! Subscribed.
I just subscribed for the same reason.
You have to be kidding.
I can't agree to 100% because there are some dangerous simplifications here.
@@bashizzle3737 I don't think the layman is interested in hearing about cross sections or the six factor formula.
The bit I am missing are the difficulties running fast reactors safely. There is much less margin of error with fast reactors (look up "void coefficient" for more information) and this is not irrational "fear" but a real risk. Assessing this risk lead to an already built fast reactor in Germany never being used (SNR-300 in Kalkar).
Green politics have long played a role in Germany rejecting nuclear. They just closed their last reactors so they can burn coal as a result.
Integrating chemical separation of spent fuel fission products into the consumer power industry is just merging nuclear weapons production into power production. It has serious implications with regard to weapons proliferation. For example, during the period of Japan's foray into reprocessing, enough plutonium to manufacture several nuclear weapons was "lost" or unaccounted for. The problem of liquid waste produced in reprocessing has not been solved, will cost trillions and the current plan for such waste is to kiln fire it into ceramic blocks. DOE estimates that $300 billion to $640 billion will be needed to finish all of Hanford's environmental cleanup by 2078. That translates to annual budgets of $5.4 billion at the low end of the estimate to $11 billion at the high end, according to DOE's 2022 Hanford LIfecycle Scope, Schedule and Cost Report. The existing ceramic industry already pours millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere yearly. Con jobs on this scale are beyond all sanity and reason and will bankrupt countries involved in these industries.
I recently found this channel. I enjoyed your episodes on Fusion and now this episode on the "forgotten" approach to recycling nuclear waste from fission plants. I'd love to show you the progress being made in IFE and the timing would be best toward the end of this year early in Q1 of '25. I see great potential for an episode that documents the journey towards MJ class lasers, among other crucial building blocks for IFE.
2:00 I always find it funny and pathetic that every time they talk about "emissions" and "pollution" on TV, they illustrate it with the cooling towers that emit... water vapour.
😁
And almost NEVER admit coal-fired power plants emit more radioactivity than nuclear plants.
The big problem of the fast reactor is that the power is more expensive, the reactor is not as safe and you get a lot of Plutonium which is much more dangerous than Uranium waste and you can build atomic weapons out of it. So if every country in the world would build fast reactors we would probably get big problems with Plutonium getting into wrong hands.
I agree with your first two points, but the fact is "every country in the world" is not going to use fast reactors for the simple reason that only a minority of countries even use nuclear at all. If every "First World" country (i.e. Free World countries that are also "developed economies") that already uses conventional reactors were to build some fast reactors for themselves, then the proliferation risk (from those specific countries) would be non-existent. This is not only because they already have considerable non-proliferation protocols, but also because they can use the plutonium as fuel for civilian reactors before it becomes a proliferation risk in the first place.
The fact that current fast reactors are less safe than current conventional reactors is a legitimate concern, but they're still safer than all non-nuclear sources of power, so I'd say the risk is negligible.
Can you say Fukushima ????????
So you clearly saw the rest of the video to see that other countries did continue to recycle, and that Reagan lifted the ban in 1981. And those big problems with plutonium getting into the wrong hands over the past 42 years?
@@ironworkerfxr7105 this is to easy. Every incident with nuclear power plant happened because of stupid people. In Chernobyl it happened because people ignored the rules of how to handle the nuclear reactor. In Fukushima it was not smart to build a nuclear power plant in an earthquake zone.
No we use nuclear power and produce highly dangerous waste that will last for tens of thousands of generations. This is pure egoism. The responsible thing to do would be to recycle that waste and reduce as much of the waste for future generations as possible.
@@ironworkerfxr7105 what about fukushima? Do i need to remind you it failed because
A) it was the worst tsunami since the 1800s
B) the backup generators placement was unsafe, general electric told them to put it elsewhere
C) anothe reactor that was CLOSER to the tsunami source was literally just fine because it was better designed
You continually capture my attention on such highly relevant topics, in particular, this one! Your intensity and enthusiasm are contagious to such an extent that your channel is the ONLY channel I subscribe to. The only one I've felt captivated enough to hit in my over 20 years of "internetting". Keep up the great work and thank you for keeping it real and not attempting to "sensationalize" the material for "views".
So, you talked me in to subscribing, too.
NEWLY SUBSCRIBED! Im so thankful you came up on my shorts feed. I actually saw that Johnny Harris video on nuclear power and i cant believe i didnt go over to yours. Well, im here now and glad for it. LOVE YOUR CONTENT and your style of presentation.
Finally! The Collab I had been waiting for so long.
Came right over after watching Johnny's vid. This was great; looking forward to diving further into your channel!
I currently work at a nuclear fuel manufacturing plant and this video is spot on. I think micro reactors will change the future of our power capabilities and the negative stigma around large nuclear reactor facilities. This video adds another aspect to the equation that will make it even better in the future. This is good stuff!
I think it adds to the equation;
Common sense versus politicians is a losing battle 😐
Common sense would also say that it's not a good idea to have many small potential sources of radioactive contamination rather than a few large ones that are well cared for. Do you realize how many idiots there are across society and what small modular reactors all over the country would mean for safety? I'd rather have a few large ones with economies of scale and a guarantee that some experts are always there.
Been watching your stuff for years, but didn't realize I wasn't subscribed...until now!