Nuclear waste is not the problem you've been made to believe it is
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This video comes with a quiz that will help you remember what we talked about: quizwithit.com/start_thequiz/...
How much nuclear waste is there, how dangerous is it, what can we do with it? Today we look into nuclear waste disposal and nuclear waste recycling.
The website that lets you calculate the radiation dose from uranium is here:
www.wise-uranium.org/rdcu.html
Numbers about the amount of nuclear waste are from here:
www.globenewswire.com/en/news...
The recent study about nuclear waste from small modular reactors is here:
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073...
More info about the final nuclear waste deposit site from Posiva Oy in Finland is here: • Onkalovideo RC01
The 1984 study about how to build a final deposit site is here:
www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/67...
The 1993 Report from Sandia Lab is here:
www.osti.gov/biblio/10117359
More about the recycling in La Hague here:
• Recycling used nuclear...
The report with the comparison of different nuclear fuel cycles is this:
www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/...
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00:00 Intro
01:26 How Much Waste and What Type?
07:26 What Happens to Nuclear Waste?
10:38 Nuclear Waste Storage
16:05 Nuclear Waste Recycling
20:29 Summary
Many thanks to Jordi Busqué for helping with this video jordibusque.com/ - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
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This video comes with a quiz that will help you remember what we talked about! quizwithit.com/start_thequiz/1689233136796x251471525332019650
Who the hell are you?
I just found your channel today and I must say that I love your sense of humor, and that I find your videos very intriguing. ☢😁
@@jipangooshes Sabine Hossenfelder, a scientist. you are jipangoo, the most lowly form of goo.
Why do we all agree that fossil fuels are a problem? I disagree. Energy is not electricity. It is necessary to burn something in order to obtain not electricity, but energy to create something: Goods, heat, tools. The blast furnace is not powered by electricity, it uses fire.
So forget the nuclear waste and the cost of safe storage.
Solar and wind plus battery storage is waaaay cheaper, safer, and as reliable, and all can be recycled.
Oh, and there's radiation and meltdowns to guard against, and years of engineering and construction and safeguards..
So who cares about nuclear? Makes no economic sense out of the gate!
And the nuclear waste of a shut down plant, whoh.
"Think of fuel rods like world leaders, but a bit more reliable".
SHOTS FIRED!
Putin is reliable at releasing propaganda.
In this analogy Putin is like well recycled nuclear fuel in a breeder reactor(20times the original energy content). Uhh that's too dark even for me 🤣
Think of fuel rods like world leaders, toxic for years after they have 'retired '
oh oh, that's good 😂 I like this game 😋
Think of fuel rods like world leaders... when no longer useful, need to be entombed in an underground bunker
"And pray that shit dilutes quickly", oh God that is why I love you Sabine. You've solidified my opinion on the subject thank you so much.
✍️✍️✍️✍️🤳🏿
I don't remember Sabine swearing and it only made it hit stronger 😂
@@piotr5566 Exactly. If you always choose your words wisely, you can make your words matter more in each moment.
"every once in awhile, something blows up and we're asked to close our windows and pray that the shit dilutes quickly!" Now that's pretty much a matter-of-fact attitude right there. Nicely done, Sabine; it's not worth getting ourselves into a conniption fit over it all!
Its interesting how everyone knows about TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima, two of didn´t kill a single person. But hardly anyone know of Bhopal chemical plant accident, that killed 20 000. Also Banqiao Dam falure that killed about 170 000 people.
And then there are stuff like Great Smog of London that people have a vague knowledge of, but don´t know that 5000 people died of acute respiratory problems... yea.. they suffocated.
Came for the nuclear waste education, stayed for the jokes.
The biggest dissapointing fact about nuclear waste, is that eating it won't give me superpowers.
Only in Troma Films is that possible. "The Toxic Advenger."
Quite so. The various movies of high level radiation producing yard long dangerous ants are amazingly stupid. See J.B.S Haldane "On Being The Right Size" which points out that large insects would need complicated things like gills or lungs, of which they have not the slightest trace. Supplying oxygen is more complicated than flying, or seeing things, or even in the case of nectar-fueled insects finding nectar!
"... like wealth distribution, the highest 3% is the most toxic" ... 😂🤣 LOVE it!
THIS
😂😂😂😂👏👏👏😘🤣🤣🤣🌹
@@slink4956 well, viewers keep growing, so mayority has spoken, we love it. That's democracy. Learn to accept it... ✊
@@slink4956 To avoid a hangover, never mix the gripe and the grin? 😂
World leaders are far more toxic than nuclear power plant radioactive waste is a great comparison
The dry storage has nothing on the dryness of your humour and I love it ❤️
Yeah, that sass.
Wow. I have not seen these videos or this woman before and I would love to use these videos in school classes as a teaching tool. Something about her is very fetching (good qualities to engage children are for the presenter to have a neutral, approachable and wise demeanor, the ones who exude wisdom cause a sense of awe and really make the students brighten up) and the videos have an authentic scholarly and easy-to-follow format.
Hi,
Saying that you haven’t seen videos of Sabine before sounds a bit more friendly than ‘this woman’.
(Just a friendly hint)
The person probably didn't confidently know her name when commenting. (Just a friendly observation).
This video needs more views. It is valuable information and there are a lot of misconceptions about nuclear power this helps dispel.
Ah, straight laced German humour with efficient scientific delivery. Love it. Subscribed
I always wondered why there are only French and British humour sitcoms on television thinking the Germans had no humor but it justs takes time for the roasts being "not too soon". It's like they are avant-garde in the area. Who knows we someday see the humour of 40-45.
Just joking here, love German M.O. and we all are reminded by Russia again how people get forced in doing stuff that they do not endorse. Roast the leaders not the crowds!
A 7 year old German boy who has never spoken a word is sitting at the dining table one evening. Suddenly, he said, "My soup is tepid." His parents are overjoyed, but eventually, his mother asks , "Darling , why have you never spoken before?" the boy replied. "Until now, everything has been satisfactory.
There's a lot that can happen in 100,000 years. She massively underestimates the duration. 100,000 years ago modern humans just started appearing in Africa. 10,000 ago humans were still in the Stone Age. Being so sure about a sketchy hypothesis is unscientific.
@@George.Andrews.😂
@@TomCruz54321used Uranium rods could be re-used in thorium reactors that would incinerate plutonium. (Source Wikipedia)
Yucca Mountain was abandoned not because of the resistance of the inhabitants but because it a part of a volcanic region made of Tuff stone, a volcanic mineral. It was cancelled because of the high possibility of a recent volcanic eruption.
Not only U235&238, Pu238 to 242 are isotopes to be regarded: Over 100 other isotopes exist due to radioactive decay network and most of the decay is producing Helium4, which induces gas pressure into the containers. The He4 2+ radicals due to the alpha decay are emitted with the speed of about ~5% of the speed of light and cause deathly damage of cells, if the decay takes place in alveoles or in between intestinal villuses. The high risk of deathly injury out of an alpha decay can be understood, if you know that the conversion factor to transform the decay energy from Gray (the energy the decay induces into a calorie meter) to Sievers (the biological impact factor of an decay particle) can be up to 70 (20 for alpha decay itself and a linear function for the maximum impact als a function of the depth of the impact in the biological tissue: In the German law StrlSchVanlage 18 C and D). In short term about 10% of the heavy metal will be emitted as He4! This He4 has the second highest gas constant behind hydrogen (2077 J/(kg K) and will crack the containers due to the high temperature caused by the decay. Other scientists say, this will happen (look in the video about Pu from the Professor of the University of Nottingham). The bentonite, that's will be disposed around the containers will also expand due to the humidity in natural environment and will produce crack in the deposit for the emitted isotopes out of the cracked containers into the biosphere.
I do not see, that the real problems are introduced to the public by this video. Funny (or not) jokes may not hide the real problems!!!
If Yucca were to experience an eruption, now tell the informed viewer how much radiation would be released even without nuclear waste in the mix.
He4 will flow harmlessly through the containers just as it does through everything else. They will lose their charge and eventually make their way to the surface where they could be collected and used in theory (The same process under salt domes that contain oil deposits causes it to be in natural gas where we collected all the world helium from, yes every helium balloon has nuclear waste inside of it.)
Your worries about disposal do not take into account the extremely low volumes produced and the ability for certain extremely small elements to travel through containment. It will not be an issue as described.
@@mikeburkart8028 He4 is inert and not radioactive and as a decay product itself not direct harmful.
He4 is a producer of leaks in the depository due to induced gas pressure and will open the door through the barriers for the radioactive ☢️ harmful isotopes into the biosphere. Therefore the He4 caused cracks into the barriers is the main problem for the safety of a deposit of highly radioactive heat producing waste and is really dangerous and must be considered in the safety assessment.
Wow!! Superbly detailed! Any studies of how to bleed off the He4?
On a lighter note, if the Sheriff of Nottingham can't help, how about Robin Hood?
You are my favorite physicist by far on TH-cam, the most genuine. What I don't understand, when people talk about the cost of a nuclear plant, is why the storage cost of nuclear waste is never included.
10 years after removal, the surface dose of a typical fuel assembly (24.000 half-life) is10.000 rem/hour.
When I listen to this wonderful person speaking in such an intelligent , reasonable manner , I actually feel better about the human race.
Sadly Rob she is like nuclear waste, in fact quite rare.
I love how you sneak physics into your comedy routines.
Nice comment . . .
She's hilarious all the more so, as her droll delivery just keeps moving on while the joke hangs out there.
@@courtlandcreekmore1421 This is my most favorite type of comedy, when the comedian dwells in it as little as possible, not at all is best, let me figure out if it's funny or not and how I should react.
"...Take my Neutrons! PLEASE!"
Sabine tries to dumb the basics down so 'special needs' folk *might* understand physics, 'and stuff', that is her fault
“Please, do not eat used nuclear fuel rods”. Thanks for the heads up 🙌
the more you know...
U-238 pellets are going to be the Tide Pod Challenge for Gen Alpha.
* cancels Deliveroo order *
She had to include it in case an american would try to do something that stupid..... Then she she can't be sued... I guess the rest of the world will go for the "If you are so stupid you will try to eat it, then it really can't be anyones problem than your own"-approach. 😉... I mean in Europe no one can sue people because you are peeing on an electric fence.... If you can't figure out it is a bad idea without a warning, then you really deserve the pain 😂😂😂😂
And it's good to know that eating one new pellet a year is fine as long as you live in a low radiation area.
I live next to a nuclear burial site. It is the low level site located in Barnwell, SC. Basically safe based on our current knowledge. I worked there for a few years before moving to the Savannah River Site, which was a producer of high level material and holds millions of gallons of high level waste. In the area of government contracting, we maintained computer systems for everything from reactors to security. In general, we were very successful in solving technical challenges.. We of course, had much less control and success of political challenges.
Elsewhere containers are leaking and radioactive waste is contaminating groundwater. We should not be messing with the most dangerous materials known to man.
Very impressive, Sabrina. Had a good laugh that I never expected, only you can make a topic as this entertaining, well done, and thank you
I can personally testify that the vast majority (I guess 90%) is not that bad. I used to work at an environmental analytical lab, and we got weekly samples of effluent and reaction slurry to run tests on, which I conducted myself. The effluent doesn't even register on the Geiger counter if you don't integrate over a day or two. I wouldn't use it to make coffee every day, but I'd rather take a bath in it than spend a day on the beach without sunscreen. The slurry had detectable radiation and other hazardous properties (BOD for example, but not as much as a blenderized sandwich after a warm day). Even that, though, the storage and waste protocols were a tad overkill in that they needlessly turned equipment and materials into low grade waste, which were in fact safe to just throw away.
If I contrast those samples with the _other_ samples I came across, there is no contest about which is more dangerous. It's the industrial and mining byproducts, by far. My workload was dominated by cyanides, [C/N]BOD, MBAS (surfactants), and flashpoints, so the big alarm bell is the cyanides. Cyanide is used in some mining and refining processes to chelate certain metal ions, and just a few grams of the solid waste products will kill you dead at several meters away under acidic conditions. They had to be diluted thousands of times just to get a result on our analytical curve, and I ended up just throwing the glassware it touched away. Distilling those samples was scary af. We called it "glass candy" because it kinda looked like chocolate fudge with shards of iridescent glass all through it, and I hope I never see it again.
You forgot to mention where the samples come from.
Was it coal power plant ash?
@@jannikheidemann3805 He said "industrial and mining byproducts". Doesn't sound like it's from coal ash.
@@thenonsequitur we're talking about two different sets of samples, totally different industries and locations. The scary cyanide samples came from mining. The less scary radioactive samples came from a nuclear reactor.
Corporate lobbyists approve this message.
Interesting, thanks for your comment!
"typically it's every 3-8 years. Think of fuel rods like world leaders, but a bit more reliable"
"it's similar to wealth distribution, the highest 3% are the most toxic"
"I really love how they assume that in 100,000 years everyone alive will be a complete idiot"
Sabine, dein Humor ist bei Zeiten ausgesprochen böse. Das gefällt mir sehr!
More generally, I/3 of fuel rods are replaced every 1 and 1/2 years and I was told by
ingineers nuclear waste is mesured in Curies.
engineers sorry
@@marcwinkler The use of Curies has been deprecated and the new SI unit for specifying the activity is Becquerel.
@@Psychx_ You are right, 1gr Radium - 1 Curie - 37 000 000 000 becquerels
do all her listeners know German? I know that TH-cam also groups people by their location and Berlin is one of this channel's meta tags, so it could very well be that this basically is a gathering of one person that has English as a second language lecturing to a bunch of people with the exact same linguistic background .. also, nur mal so meine Mutmaßungen dazu 😅
The question isn't whether you'd want to live near a nuclear waste site, it's whether you'd want to live near one built 60K years ago that you don't even know about, or if you live in a tunneling society that lives deep in the ground because surface conditions are inhospitable.
I see no problems with any of that. Of course, a tiny problem for the tunneling society, but they'll learn soon enough and stop poking the material.
I've been hooked on your video since the first one the amount of information that you deliver is phenomenal and your sense of humor is hysterical much appreciated
"I'd say it kind of works like a water mill, just a little more dangerous."
I'm gonna call you on that one. If you compare the fatalities from nuclear power plants vs. the fatalities from actual water mills (hydroelectric or hydromechanical power in all its forms), I'm pretty sure the nuclear plants are safer.
Here's the problem with measuring safety by rate of fatalities: The well-known paradoxon that that fatalities might be low precisely because of high awareness of unsafety and lots of safety measures. For example, if you meaure the safety of street types for bicycles and you go by fatalities, you might find that a German Autobahn is safer than a Dutch bike lane - because hundreds of thousands of people cycle on the bike lanes and virtually no one on the Autobahn, and even if one ends up on the road, they will be extremely cautious. Similarly, a worker in a water mill might be much more cavalier with safety precisely because the risk is lower.
@@Nebufelis "a worker in a water mill might be much more cavalier with safety precisely because the risk is lower."
If workers being cavalier causes more fatal accidents, then that's a work culture problem _and it makes that workplace less safe than one with a better safety culture._ The risk is not lower. The risk is higher. You are more likely to get hurt working there, which is the bottom line of risk.
No one is saying nuclear power doesn't have potential hazards. But if those hazards are mitigated through combinations of hazard removal efforts, engineered controls, safe procedures, and a strong safety culture, then I don't see the issue in saying that this is, in all the ways that matter, a safer work environment than one that lacks these things because there's a failure to perceive potential hazards and therefore gets people hurt.
The statistics bear this out. Nuclear is the safest power source by far. _How_ it gets safe isn't the question, what matters is that there's objective and indisputable proof that it _is_ the safest in terms of injuring or killing the fewest people.
@@wasd____ ..potential hazards!!!!!
@@Trylobyte Yes, there are many potential hazards at a hydro plant. All that water has a lot of energy. Read the stories of what happens when those dams break.
She was talking about the process by which work is extracted...i.e. via steam turbine. She was not talking about risk at that point.
The thing I've never understood, is that people are terrified of the ONLY waste that is actually properly managed. Nuclear waste leak: international crisis. Coal exhaust: dump it straight into our air supply.
Actually the proliferation of world ending weapons is up there with the problem of waste.
Safe storage of waste requires best practice over decades if not centuries. The track record of large companies not caring about anything other than short term profits tells me that the good ideas of this video will not be implemented. Not saying we shouldn’t look at nuclear. Just saying let’s be honest.
@@raoul1234567 You can't make nuclear weapons with nuclear waste, you can only make dirty bombs; which while bad aren't really on the same scale. And as shown in the video the simplest storage method is "put it back where you got it from", which doesn't suggest any imminent danger.
@@PlatinumAltaria No you can’t. Weapons are made by tweaking the fuel cycle and enrichment of the same fuel used to generate electricity. Can’t think of a nuclear powered country that doesn’t have or doesn’t want nuclear weapons.
Seepage of nuclear waste from faulty containment into groundwater is a real risk as is radioactive water from tailings dams at uranium mines. That’s not theoretical. That’s has already occurred many times.
@@raoul1234567 No, weapons are made using highly-enriched uranium. It's not a process any individual is going to be able to do, you need HUGE infrastructure. You should really just look this stuff up, nuclear waste does not make nuclear bombs, it just doesn't. Stopping countries from keeping the lights on is not some kind of noble anti-war crusade, it's demanding that old ladies freeze to death because you don't understand science.
Mine runoff is nothing to do with nuclear power, it's a problem with all mining that can be solved with proper planning.
@@raoul1234567 At least they won't be implemented if things are decided by companies.
20 Seconds and the sarcasm is already killing me. Or it might be the thorium sources from my collected smoke detectors i glued on my head hoping for superintelligence. It's giving me the vibes my teachers in primary school gave us. Only they didn't roast you for the audience's entertainment, just for their own fun. Love the presentation as always! Since the roasts never intersected with my way of thoughts yet(come close sometimes but not intersecting), I will push that subscribe button. Knowingly that those buttons in general will throw my email address around shouting : "Send me whatever you got!". Thank GOD(Guy's odd disorder) I'm feeling crazy today.
Smoke detectors use Americium sources. Thorium is probably most abundantly available in gas light mantles.
I cannot recommend using any radiation source in an attempt to boost cognitive ability.
Are you familiar with responsive sarcasm/humor? I was rather hoping on a funny response, not being taken seriously. Still can't believe I got fact-checked on a joke.
@@guyvandenbroeck8405
I thought my response was a real knee-slapper.
If I have an issue with nuclear power, it’s the occasional, yet spectacular, instances of nuclear reactors failing: Chernobyl & Fukushima being the two obvious instances. I was very surprised to find out that cooling for the Fukushima reactors wasn’t integrated into the reactor itself, which resulted in the meltdowns of the four reactors at the site, even though all of the reactors had been “shut down”. Also, the cooling ponds at the site dried out due to the shut down cooling pumps for the cooling ponds. I didn’t know that spent fuel rods generated that much heat on their own.
So, for me, there are reasonable safety issues to consider with nuclear power. Come up with a truly safe reactor design and I’m all for it.
I couldn't help but laugh out loud with "the higher 3% are the most toxic". Please keep adding this hidden gems while sharing these very interesting topics with us.
Yes the concept is laughable.
Remember in the USA, the top few percent of income earners pay almost all the taxes, and the bottom quartile pay no taxes.
@@donkloos9078 Hahahahaha
@Don Kloos , income-earners aren't the problem. The real problem is untaxed generational wealth.
@@jonathangwynne1917 Inheritance tax is confiscating people's private property that has already been taxed many times over. Socialism does not work and killed almost 150 million people last century.
I’m always surprised at how many people casually accept breathing highly toxic vehicle exhaust (happens when your car us idling in traffic), but are afraid of nuclear waste that won’t be anywhere near them.
You're measuring the wrong dimensions for nuclear waste. You're measuring it in space, when in fact it needs to be measured in time.
I mean China gets to keep building Coal Plants while Americans aren't allowed to drive gas powered cars anymore, and in Ireland they want to get rid of all the Cows. How is any of that fair? The UN shouldn't be able to do any of those things until China is shut down for the sake of the Earth. If you aren't going to do that, THEN GFTO!
Yeah, it’ll be somebody else’s problem long after we’re gone!
@@outerspaceisalieok let’s measure in time. How many years until carbon dioxide is decomposed?
@@igortolstov487 My God...do the world a favor and read a basic science text.
I grew up near a nuclear plant, complete with on-site hot pool storage of spent fuel rods.
I have no problem with low-level waste - discarded jumpsuits, boots, and other PPE. If you think I want to live near a hot pool of spent fuel with all the security problems and ongoing costs that entails, you have another thing coming. This stuff will be dangerous for a longer than I'll be alive. We were told in 1969 when the plant was being planned that nuclear power would be cheap cheap cheap. It turned out to be an ongoing federal headache, with the plant on the NRC watchlist nearly continuously, and the electrical rates are second-highest in the nation. We were told it would be safe - it wasn't. They had numerous radiation releases over the years. Maybe thorium will be good, but uranium is not on my preference list.
Although I don’t live exactly in the area, I have heard of stories from this place near the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge about just how bad the chemical plants there have caused cancer within the local population. Even from my own personal experience, this one paper mill that used to operate not too far from where I lived went bankrupt and had to close down during the 2008 market crash and it singlehandedly made a large brake/creek/swamp area near where I live have hazardous toxins within the water there and make it unsafe to as much as fish out of it due to how bad the toxins have contaminated that water, so I mean yeah Nuclear waste can be pretty bad but in many ways it doesn’t even hold a candle to how dangerous chemical waste is to people and to the environment.
Sabine, you are absolutely my favorite physicist. From fora where you dispute multiverses to discussions of various topics on high energy particle physics and other esoteric subjects, you make things clear and relatively easy to understand. Thank you.
I would add that Sabine uses the right amount of humour on her videos.
The evolution of Sabine's humor has been one of the best things science youtube ever produced.
It's dry humor, which is like food. Some people just don't get it.
@@CR67 But this is just DARK humor. Like the skincolor of many people who don't get enough food.
Still just a little more to work on, though. Maybe just the faintest hint of a smile maybe?
@@rand49er the lack of the smile is what makes this kind of humor work though.
the humor seems very... "German." I love it.
Nuclear reactors are a stupid way to generate energy, because assuming you need most energy to cope with heating in the Winter, the whole system has to be scaled to meet the peak in winter demand because they take such a long time to ramp up and ramp down. In the summer they will be mostly redundant. Which is unfortunate, as the cost of nuclear energy is mostly in the cost of the reactor itself, rather than the fuel. If they ever get fusion to work the reactors are even more expensive to make relative to their energy output. I guess Thorium reactors will be pretty expensive too, since Thorium isn't an ideal fuel to use in nuclear reactors. The whole reason we are looking at Thorium is because Uranium is starting to get expensive, due to the growing demands on the limited supply.
Basically this is not a good approach. Maybe generating leccy in places with high solar energy and then using that energy to produce e-fuels such as methane would be the best idea.
“Every once in awhile,
something blows up, and we are asked to shut the windows and pray the shit dilutes quickly” is the funniest description of this i have ever heard.
I think it is Ph.D.-level gallows humor.
The probability of a truly horrid event is very low, but the cost in lives of such an event would be VERY high.
Cavalier humor. Awesome.
"Even Keith Richard won't be around by then." Thanks for the smile.
He will end up being the last man standing on earth! Lol
But Cher will be. Dating someone much younger, I bet.
Don't be too sure of that
Bwahaha😂
@@johnnybgoode7983 I have a notion that all the drugs & alcohol in his system has pickled his organs and made him immortal.
I come for the information, but stay for the humour.
Sabine's humour is dried than a desert drought... Love it!!
@John smart Let's bang, ok?
A 2 hour lecture from Sabine would be perfectly fine with us
Love the subtle humor injected in the midst of a serious topic👍🏻👍🏻
I was hiking with a friend and talking about nuclear waste solutions about the same time this was uploaded. I also told him about this channel earlier on the hike. Fantastic timing
she always uploads on Saturday 😉
Keith Richards was asked in the 80's how he felt about his public image as "walking death," and that only he and cockroaches would be alive after a nuclear holocaust. Without hesitation he responded, "I would need something to eat wouldn't I." He's still alive today.
In addition to your excellent sense of humor and competence, your wardrobe is genuinely excellent. Great upload as always.
Whilst managing the waste might well be the lesser of evils, a failure of reactors is often horrendously costly to remediate. Fukushima melted fuel rods are yet to be removed 13 years later, and crews have been working 24/7 in very dangerous conditions for the last 13 years working toward that end. To date, several hundred million man hours have been invested managing the damaged reactors, and they are not even close to fully stabilising the situation there.
Dr. Hossenfelder is great. She breaks down scientific issues into easily understandable pieces. We need more instructors like her. More people would be interested in science if instructors communicated more conventionally and they didn't feel like they were being talked down to. She's also very funny. Love the deadpan delivery of her little jokes.
I think the concept that is often misunderstood is that it is ultra heavy and dense. so while it does seem like a lot of waste it is contained in a much smaller volume than you would expect
And the toxicity of it is contained in a very small volume
The Swiss use nuclear for 35% ish of their energy needs they've been doing it for around 30-40 years, they can fit all their nuclear waste in one room, its a big room, but still.
@@Prometheus7272 - If they did actually put it all in one room, would it go critical?
(Only half kidding.)
@@sirrathersplendid4825 You'd get meltdown before it went critical. If you kept on throwing waste into the molten puddle on the floor, it'd get hotter and hotter until it melts the floor and forms a radioactive gas cloud. Getting it to explode requires it to be crushed together quicker than it can melt and vapourise. Not trivial.
@@MattOGormanSmith - Interesting answer. Cheers!
Given current trends, I would argue in 100k years humans will supplant farm animals as a food source for whatever the dominant species is.
It is extremely interesting that it is easier to understand the English of a German than that of an English native.
-->Some things that are wrong in this video, the most important at the end:
_Measuring the toxicity of nuclear waste based on its total radioactivity without discriminating the type and manner in which it may present toxicity.
_Not considering the toxicity of an element with which we did not evolve and which, due to its radioactivity, is enormously powerful if it enters the body, such as an "innocuous" alpha emitter with a 30,000-year half-life.
_Compare the tonnages of radioactive waste with the total industrial waste (nobody gets poisoned by broken bricks). Mix pears with bananas.
_Cover up the damage with the benefits of nuclear power or compare it to the coal disaster. "the other one is worse".
_Assuming that anyone can be aware of radioactive or other contamination and can take action when there are plenty of examples that this is not the case and the “responsible” organizations have shown a lack of responsibility.
_A long-term storage site does exist, but it has not been sufficiently studied, the implementation is not developed, it cannot be adequately controlled and it has not been legally accepted; it is the continental subduction trench, whose speeds of movement and return to the surface we can today calculate quite accurately.
_The problem is not that it is possible to properly dispose of waste (wasting strategic materials such as copper) but that it is actually done. We have a long history of industrial and nuclear spills in the Adriatic and Atlantic at the hands of the Italian mafia who made their money dealing with European nuclear waste. That is a problem that has not been solved, nobody has gone down there to look for all that garbage thrown in common steel barrels.
_Yeah. All nuclear fuel "can be re-processed in a nuclear reactor." Soviet books from the 50s and 60s abounded on the benefits of producer reactors and the infinite recycling of nuclear fuel. But ''can'' doesn't mean 'is', so they have huge reactor graveyards that they started cleaning up with the help of France. In the same way "we can" avoid plastic or any kind of garbage and "all plastics can be completely eliminated and recycled into elemental chemicals." ''Can'' does not mean that it will be done and in fact it is not done nor is there an intention to do it.
The whole plot has the problem of "if we did..."
Love the humour in this presentation. And just for the record, Keith Richards is immortal!
Oh, I hope so! 😁
Just listened to Between the Buttons---a great album.
Their music has a longer half life than plutonium.
As someone living next to a nuclear waste storage (not a long-term one, stuff is stored above ground), I absolutely prefer this to living next to a coal plant. Radiation levels in my city are actually lower than those in the nearby cities.
Until there’s an accident
@@ptech88Statistically still safer than living next to a coal station.
@@ptech88 next to nuclear storage an accident might happen, and it might make you sick.
Living next to a coal plant you'll definitely get sick, no accident required. Since the coal plant being there IS the accident.
@@tharealmb nice point
Thanks for all the links in the description. Many vloggers promise those, yet few actually provide them.
All your work is very professional and top-notch. I like your channel and videos. Keep it up! ❤
Sabine is the perfect blend of wit, wisdom and science. I don't drive long car journeys anymore, but if I did then I would take her lectures with me.
Nice pick for a lobby pr spokesperson
@@sensationsuperthrust I would call you a Troll, but I do not insult Robots. Find a mirror, and think before you speak...
@@damonreitmeier4539 beep boop beep boop :V
And music, don't forget about her music :)
She does has a sense humor
I've always considered humor and intelligence inextricably bound. Sabine is a wonderful example. Her channel is a shinning example of unbiased, concise, research - driven information.
Did you mean shining?
Holtec international has a well thought out storage plan for spent nuclearfue it's above ground in New Mexico far away from any large metropolitan area the dry fuel storage casks are stored in a retrievable manner in a nice safe place, in fortunately United States spent fuel recycling was shut down it was a silly act that industry would have to be restarted be because the working knowledge has been lost there would be an initial learning curve hopefully short. The government will most likely have to get in volved, btw I have over forty years as a radiation protection tech notion and a couple of short stints as an engineer.
I've always considered scientists and lies for huge money schemes involving inflated fears inextricably bound. Sabine is a wonderful example of a fisisist well versed in lies.
And propaganda. She won't be around when Earth will have become a radioactive wasteland, so what does she care? Remember Tchernobyl and Fukushima? More such accidents are to be expect as we rely more and more on aging installations and overconfident and careless personnel.
@@davidnewland2461 Please reread and correct your text. Also add punctuation. You may be an engineer but your explanations make litte sense.
"spent nuclearfue it's above ground in New Mexico " what is?
"United States spent fuel recycling was shut down it was a silly act that industry would have to be restarted " Etc...
👍Always a double bonus with Sabine:
Technical and scientific content AND Dry wit 👍
12:49 takes some beating: “Every once in a while something blows up there and we are all asked to close the windows and prey that the shit dilutes quickly”
Actually, the biggest problem with radioactive particles is that our body confuses some elements caused by a similar chemical structure and thinks its eg calcium and stores it in the bones as it normaly would. So it remains there for a lifetime and radiates in your body every day. If this happens with a natural calcium element, then there is no radiation. But imagine you have a radioactive strontium particle in your finger, which you will never find and cant remove it.
...and the magic is that when you are cremated, these particles become someone else's death warrant. On and on, for thousands of lifetimes. Thanks, Nuclear.
Personally, I'd really like to hear more information about the possibilities for nuclear reprocessing, presented in such a clear and digestible manner (I promise not to eat it).
Thanks Sabine very informative as always. Love the top 3% toxicity dig!
@@egparker5 it is based on their behavior.
@@egparker5 If you don't think the oligarch class deserves digs, you are part of the problem.
@@egparker5 Sure is; much like my prejudices against other toxic things. Speaking generally, the top 3% control the world and are hastening its demise. There are a few honourable exceptions within this group.
The cost to launch the waste into even low Earth orbit would be insane...send it to the Sun is as hard as sending it into deep space.
As a former Navy Nuke, I can confirm. The really dangerous stuff has a very short half life. Anything useful is extracted and what's left can be stored pretty easily. It takes up very little space and may actually be useful in the future as technology finds ways to generate power from the remnants.
Due to the amount of nuclear reactors and weapon production, there is tones of nuclear waste that is not recycled and is being store and will remain dangerous for up to 200,000 years.
@@iainhamilton6773 "Dangerous for 200,000 years" -- No. That's not how this works. Google and read "Dr Bernard Cohen the myth of plutonium toxicity" and "ThorCon documents pdf the nuclear waste problem".
Google Rosatom’s Seversk plant. The technology is already there.
As someone who used to work in nuclear radiation monitoring, thank you for pointing out how little waste is created and that 90% is low level.
Could have pointed out that low level is mostly not radioactive.. (just overly cautious)
And really, i would have loved if you used "banana equivalent dosage" like we used to haha.
I'm not sure if people realise how much (obivously very low level) radioactive matieral/environments we're potentially exposed to in our everyday lives... wristwatches with fluorescent hands, some old camera lens coatings, smoke detectors, long haul air travel, radon beneath our homes...
I prefer the chest X-ray (70 000 bananas) as a metric.
Thanks… I forgot the banana dose blurb from the 1960s, Ha.
How many Megabananas are we talking about?
@@CAThompson "one point twenty-one giga-bananas... where are we going to get one point twenty-one giga bananas??"
This video should be required viewing for all major environmental groups.
Sabine long ago made up her mind on nuclear energy - she is for it. This video makes a show of objectivity but ultimately confirms her prejudices . . .
@@jamesneilsongrahamloveinth1301 Well - Is it good for environmental groups? I figure Greenpeace has a few prejudices as well as some others.
I just finished viewing another video, that says that even in the 1960s there were designs for nuclear reactors that can used RECYCLED fuel rods - and that the recycling process also greatly decreases their half-life. What with that? They said President Jimmy Carter stoped the recycling because it produces plutonium and that was banned by some international decree against nuclear arms
Now that's a bold statement about Keith Richards..
I minor correction, the energy density of uranium is much higher than the figure you gave. In a breeder reactor, the mass specific energy density of uranium is about 2.6 million times higher than coal, or 40 million times higher by volume.
So all those used fuel rods they dumped into the Irish sea from Windscale for over thirty tears don't make any difference? How about all that corium, and the other one thousand or so isotopes of nuclear fission? Some iodine isotopes have a half life of 16 million years.
Really long half-life material means that it rarely decays which means that it's basically not radioactive. Really big half-life numbers mean that the material is safe, at least from the perspective of radioactivity. A lot of it is still heavy metals which can give you heavy metal poisoning.
About 40 years ago when I embarked on a short "Nuclear Engineering" course, the prevailing opinion on long life waste management was, "encapsulate waste radioactive beads in glass".
This supposedly made the stuff safer, & particularly resistant to ground water, thought to be a potential risk in in long term deep subteranian storage. So what happened: too costly, too difficult, or do the powers that be not care sufficiently?
Apparantly, most vitrified HLW has stability issues. The glass tends to anneal into distinct domains with crystal boundaries, especially with ongoing decay heat. As fission products get excluded from the annealing glass, it accumulates in the interfaces and become available to travel through the material and corrode the encapsulating container.
Other issues are as you suggest. Too costly for a start. Direct disposal of intact spent fuel has the advantage (touted elsewhere by others) that the pellets are a more robust matrix and sealed in zircal jackets (not counting broken ones), and that the reactors have the handling devices to put these directly in casks with minimal future handling if those casks could be disposal-rated. It is also difficult to process into a form that leads to proliferation risks. In contrast, reprocessing results in two waste streams needing different treatment and disposal facilities. It also concentrates plutonium which then becomes a proliferation and security risk. France has reprocessed about one third of all their spent fuel, and has huge interim stockpiles of both vitrified waste and plutonium.
It seems that reprocessing is more expensive than expected, and creates two types of waste that each need more fiddling around than the original intact spent fuel. It multiplies the problems rather than solving them.
Something similar seems to happen with the noble attempts to re-use spent fuel. After reprocessing the separated plutonium is added to depleted uranium, plus a top-up from excess weapons material to make MOX.
Used MOX has a more diverse set of plutonium bombardment products, in particular U236 and it's product U232 which complicate almost every subsequent option.
Or as you suggest, they may not care. The spent fuel inventory increases annually and seems to remain in the "too-hard" basket. No one is willing to allocate the money to do it properly.
Sabina is right about nuclear waste being a minor drawback to nuclear energy generation. The power it generates creates wealth widely enough distributed to provide positive health benefits that far exceed projected, and time-distant, negative effects of nuclear waste.
For the longest time, and maybe still, the largest inventory of nuclear waste in the US has been plutonium production for nuclear weapons. Today, the largest construction project in the US is the waste vitrification plant being built north of Richland Washington on the Hanford Reservation.
Hanford began producing nuclear waste in the 1940's with the Manhattan Project.
I have 'grave doubts' about the prospect that this vitrification plant will process a major part of the waste found it was intended to. It is incredibly complex and the maintenance challenges are enormous. This project is of a scale far larger than ever attempted. I offer this opinion as an engineer who once worked for Bechtel on the plant for but two years and about 20 years ago.
I remain a resident of the largest city near it, Richland WA, and have no qualms about uncontrolled waste ending up in our food supply to any consequential extent.
The book "The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear' by Dr Petr S. Beckmann (1924-1993) is a sound reference. Wait, he died 30 years ago! Yes, the health benefits of using nuclear power have been widely known in intelligent circles for at least that long.
This was great. 😃 I would not even mind a 2h lecture so engaging when one knows how to explain complex subjects this well. 🤗
This is absolutely a topic I'd love a 2 hour lecture on! I once watched a 5 hour video on nuclear power and waste straight through without stopping 😅 I'm here for it!
@@b_dawg_17 Agree. 💯
But also the way it is presented matters; she does it so well. 🤗
Start with the economics of storage.
Do you think the companies that profit from the making of nuclear waste will be the ones to fund the safe storage?
If not, who will?
Yes...the public.
This is NEVER mentioned when we discuss how cost effective it is.
Then, let's look at a world map 100,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago and 12,000 ( during the ice age ) and tell me a storage location that will be suitable. Anyone?
Now, the comparison between nuclear waste and other forms of waste from energy production.
Basically, this argument boils down to, "they make pollution now, that they could deal with, but don't...with nuclear they will suddenly be concerned about by-product magically".
Seriously...I expect better from Sabine.
This is where her sarcasm should hit...instead she basically says "well they don't purify waste from coal, but nuclear waste storage will be faultless so it wins"
WTF?
@@yt.personal.identification you clearly are an Alien that never bothered to engage or even observe Humans.
These Biologicals in their current Evolution will NEVER as a Group do Shit that benefits them as a Group. These Biologicals are to Combative to EVER achieve a Planetary Solution to Topics like Energy Prouduction or Health Care and Education as a Group, a Corporation or Research Institute might do that and then a very interesting aka bloody Time will ensue. The Last Super Power on this Mud Ball keeps it's Citizens in debt on Principle to make sure that a few Control Hungry Biologicals can Feed their urges instead of making all of the above Topics avilable to their Citizens in an achievable Matter.
Nuclear Power Is a potent and Right now cheap Energy Prouduction Method, with a high cost for the Public in the Future. It will die when Humans invent a new Method, aka cold Fusion. Until then political needs will dictate the availability of Nuclear Energy to the Public. It Is Not that hard to Understand that, so the question Is what YOU do Not understand about that in regards to this Info Clip.
Shine Bright and stay Healthy
@@yt.personal.identification Let's just burn every hydrocarbon in existence then, because nuclear bad. Kek.
11:35 While some say that Nuclear Energy production is cheaper, when taking into account the cost of engineering/ storing/ monitoring the nuclear waste, I've heard it said that the true cost would be like paying $1,000,000 for a cheeseburger 🍔
Well said. In addition to waste management/storage, you've got the cost of building the plants (reportedly it takes a decade) and the cost of de-commissioning them (reportedly it takes two decades) - not to mention the environmental costs of so doing. . .
@@jamesneilsongrahamloveinth1301 I didn't know that it took so long to build or decommission, but that doesn't surprise me either. Thank you for the knowledge!
@@jamesneilsongrahamloveinth1301 "two decades" ?? closer to 60 years.
From: *Nuclear Nonsense: Why Nuclear Power is No Answer to Climate Change and the World's Post-Kyoto Energy ChallengesChange and the World's Post-Kyoto Energy Challenges* by Benjamin K. Sovacool Christopher Cooper
*In the United States, there are currently thirteen nuclear power plant units that have permanently shut down and are in some phase of the decommissioning process, but not a single one of them has completed it* For example, Peach Bottom Unit 1 was shut down in October 1974, but will not even begin decommissioning until 2034.2' The Humboldt Bay nuclear facility was shut down in July 1976, but will not be completely decommissioned until 2012 or 2013.255 Zion Units 1 and 2 were permanently shut down in 1998, but the plant will not begin decommissioning until 2013. Further, unless license extensions are granted, all licenses for commercial
nuclear reactors in the United States will expire by 2038 and more than 100 reactors will enter the decommissioning phase, requiring billions
of dollars with little or no generating capacity to offset these costs.
Decommissioning at nuclear sites that have experienced an accident is far more expensive and time consuming. At Three Mile Island, Unit 2, which shutdown permanently after an accident in 1979, will not start the decommissioning process until 2014.
Fuel rods at Chernobyl, the site of the world's deadliest nuclear accident to date, are still being removed and operators expect it to take until at least 2038 to 2138 before the power plant is completely decommissioned.
This is excellent - thank you! Great presentation which holds the viewer's attention and contains relevant, interesting (and at times, fun) information. I really enjoyed this demystification.
100,000 years is a time scale beyond my comprehension. Currently we cannot even prevent water companies dumping sewage into rivers or the sea.
Please remember that the reason we have natgas (and oil) in geological reservoirs under high pressure, with methane being an incredibly volatile and tiny molecule, is that nature has put a lid on it for tens of millions of years.
Please remember that fission products are soluble in water and can percolate through salt domes.
Natural gas is not water soluble.
The two examples are not comparable in practice, though nuclear boosters love to pretend.
yes we can. Its called laws.
I seem to recall suggestions for using tectonic subduction zones to slowly bury waste. There are problems with dependence on uncontrolled natural processes which can have unpredictable violent excursions from place to place, I suppose…
I just commented above about burial in deep ocean basins - in those basins the likely hood of some unanticipated process occurring (new riff zone or volcanic hot spot) is very low
Thanks! I'm working at Kairos Power now and we need all the straight talk we can get.
Is that in Egypt?
It just seems true that we need Fission ASAP now for baseload, perhaps gas from grass by ecotricity and hydro for peak time, until we arrive at a nice clean harmless renewables grid? :)
@@jannikheidemann3805 haha, No, it's in CA. Molten salt cooled fission reactors. Nice try.
@@TheHorseshoePartyUK The public image of fission power has recovered some of the lustre that it had in the 60s. Now that the balance of concentrated power justify the negative implications of concentrated waste it's a better trade off than fossil fuels and the harm those emissions do to the climate. Many people are coming to this conclusion. It's spawning a renaissance in atomic energy. Thanks.
@@Quroxify I've heard the latest generation of full size fission reactors are even safer than they already are in good hands? People mean well but they do not quite realise - Fission has been running silently in the background for decades with only one real catastrophic meltdown and a handful of admittedly tragic, but small scale 'minor accidents' where material has escaped into the public and caused serious problems
I am honestly surprised that no-one seems to ever mention subseabed waste disposal. The idea was basically to move the High Level Waste to transport casks. Then transport the HLW on ships, and drop the casks into the ocean. The casks would settle into the deep ocean seabed, and due to their density - and the shape of the cask - they would relatively quickly bury themselves under the surface. The composition of deep ocean sediment (well away from shore) is extremely fine clay that will resist the diffusion of the radioactive material, and thus prevent its dispersal into the open ocean for geologic timescales. Diffusion rates were estimated at only a few meters of diffusion after 10,000 years, and the further it diffuses, the slower it proceeds. The most geologically stable area on the planet is the seabed in the middle of the Pacific plate. It has remained undisturbed geologically for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. It also has the benefit of being incredibly difficult to access without spending a prohibitive amount of money on deep sea submersibles to even get a look at the Pacific ocean floor, let alone actually dig up a 50,000+kg fuel cask, and bring it to the surface. (Recent history shows deep-sea submersibles and thriftiness do not mix well) No need for signs or spike fields. No need for RayCats. Just drop it off a ship into the middle of the ocean where it sinks under the seabed clay, never to cause trouble again.
Disclaimer: Not a scientist, nuclear engineer, or anything like that, just a passionate pro-nuclear activist who is baffled by the lack of attention to this method. That being said, I haven't seen any sort of counterargument against subseabed disposal. As far as my casual reading and internet searching has gone, (i.e. not actual research, just google browsing until I got bored) I haven't seen any arguments against it. Its more like very few are aware of it at all, at least to my perception. I'd love to know why no one has picked it back up after the inital US project was cancelled. (Political difficulties don't count)
Yea. This is one of two cheap foolproof methods. I like it too. You never hear about it because 1- anti-nuclear Green activists don't want a solution. They just want an excuse to be against nuclear power. 2- Nuclear waste is not as dangerous as everyone things, and disposal is not a problem.
Hey Sabine, I'm a fan of your channel and I suggest that you look for Thorium powered nuclear reactor, which are liquid fuel, the Molten Salt Reactors. They are even more safer nuclear reactors.
Great overview and uncluttered information. Thanks.
I also love the humor interspersed in this and your other videos.
Here is a quote from the 1960s by one of my college classmates about non radioactive power. However, it mainly refers to getting to an 8 o'clock class on time: "Knowledge is power, but Sleep is more powerful than Knowledge".
BY DRINKING STAR : "... AND NOW, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE MOST POWERFUL ENTITY : ....O...P...T...I...O...N....
HUH ?!?
YA CHOOSE : TO SLEEP OR ....PRAY.... YEAAAAAAH....LOVE
@Sabii Bryan SABRYAN🤣
I should consider this the night before an exam
As one that lived in W Germany in the 80s I can totally relate to chemical exposure.
She doesn’t mean drugs.
I live on the US Gulf Coast near Houston, and there are gigantic chemical plants near me from Dow, BASF, etc. And we have some coal fired plants. Texas has a lot of wind power, but in the end our electricity in the greater Houston region is still predominantly fossil fuel based. And I would much rather live near a nuclear power plant than near a chemical plant, or our coal fired plants. Wind would be great, except there isn't room for that many wind turbines near our city.
@@alvarofernandez5118 What's the matter with coal fired plants? They don't pollute, they emit plant food.
@@vtbn53 Coal plants emit huge amounts of pollution, including radioactive particles.
@@vtbn53 yeah... nope. They emit burnt plant smoke and ash. :-)
Informative and clear. A comparison might be drawn between how few people have ever been killed by nuclear power stations against how many are killed by the direct effects of mining, fossil fuels, the pollution of burning fossil fuels, the direct effects of fires, floods, droughts et al and the indirect effects of destroying crops, losing homes so relocation and the stresses of that. Migration away from areas turned into deserts or war zones? I've seen a figure of 8.1 million for pollution effects but that is surely nowhere near the real number? From a nuclear scientist aquaintance I understand incredibly slack safety standards in the ex-USSR & its satellites were respnsible for Chernyoble and other such accidents. He went through these areas after Chernoyble strengthening their safety measures at those countries requests. What about an Intrnational Inspectorate to ensure all Nuclear Power stations are safe and remain safe?
The biggest problem is NIMBY ("not in my back yard") and that makes it near impossible to get rid of all kinds of nuclear waste, no matter how dangerous it is. Of course, huge countries have a big advantage because of vast uninhabitated areas that have not been flooded for at least 100 years, and humans are unable to think any longer.
Question: if we really really wanted to get rid of spent fuel, and couldn't get any more energy out of it, is it possible to stick it in a nuclear reactor anyway and transmute it into something safe at a net loss of energy? Such as using 1 fresh rod to neutralize 10 spent rods.
Yes, it's possible with fast neutrons reactors. However the Greens hate these even more than ordinary reactors, and successfully killed all of these in Europe.
The Pu 239 can be reprocessed into fuel. The problem is that it can be used to make a nuclear bomb, by people with a much lower technology level than needed for a uranium bomb.
@@mikesmith2682
Then we should just make sure it’s processed and used on-site as fuel.
Even other radioactive isotopes can technically be transmuted with high energy protons/electrons or used as radioactive sources in industry.
yes, you can further "convert" problematic isotopes into something less harmful using energy. this principle is an even rather old idea. I believe that currently, you'd have net loss not just in that converting process, but overall .. know what I mean? but should like nuclear fusion become a reality, this problem/issue could be tackled. that's why it could be a wise idea to not just bury everything (apart from other potential use cases we currently have no idea of/about like maybe even in medicine). I'm sorry should any of this already be part of this video as well .. I'm yet to watch it 😅
@@cezarcatalin1406 Yes, but there is an energy or neutron budget the facility has to meet. Many (most?) reactor designs don't produce enough extra neutrons to transmute the nasties, and building a big enough proton gun, etc., will cost a LOT.
Thanks for a often humoristic presentation or a serious (though perceived so) matter. Most enlightening and entertaining.
"I really loved how they [experts] assumed that in 100 thousand years everyone alive will be a complete idiot"
This absolutely made my day 😆
Love you Sabine 🙌🏼🙌🏼❤️
Nuclear waste can be dangerous, so its storage is closely monitored and regulated. The waste from coal fired powerstations is also dangerous and must be stored somewhere.
Unfortunately, the waste from coal fired power stations gets stored in the atmosphere.
The main problem with high level radioactive waste is the human factor. As with bridges needing repairs (and collapsing), dams that fail or just fail to be adequately maintained, it is unlikely the storage framework for high level radioactive waste will fare better (even on a single human lifetime scale). Within five years the regulators will be co-opted by the contractors and essentially quit "inspecting" and start helping them come up with ways to cut costs. Maybe if we get some kind of AI regulator and standards police that would not have the human factor it could work. It would still require the politicians to fund the needed work when constituents have more immediate desires. Until there is a more failsafe system we can afford for 100,000 years, too many examples of the waste not being stored properly with leaks.
Yes. As she says "That's quite a challenge". I always think of Homer Simpson as an example of Nuclear plant and storage facility workers. This IS the achilles heal of nuclear power.
If we bury it in deep geological repositories or e.g. Yucca, no inspections are needed after the storage is sealed. Creating interim storage facilities isn't that hard.
@@jesan733 Be sure to let Fukushima and Hanford folks know how NOT hard it is to deal with waste. Real life evidence seems to show it is hard or at least so expensive the waste creators don't want to spend the money...which gets back to my original point.
@@scootstate8480 I'm not talking about cleanup operations after reactor meltdowns or early nuclear weapons processing. I'm talking about the ease with which we can store and create final repositories for normal high level waste fuel elements.
We could talk about the former challenges too, and there my firm position is that governments routinely spends far too much money on them through regulatory ratcheting.
FYI: The subscription form for your newsletter doesn't work with Firefox's "Enhanced Tracking Protection." This isn't necessarily your website's fault, and I've filed a report to Mozilla... To other Firefox users: you can disable the Enhanced Tracking Protection for an individual website by clicking on the "shield" icon on the left side of the address bar and toggling it off there.
Spent high-level fuel is not _dangerous_ for 100 000 years. That was a number back-calculated from the arbitrary and unnecessary requirement that the spent fuel should be stored until it has the same activity as the ore that was once mined as fuel.
In practical terms, after 2 000 years, you can put nuclear fuel in a museum, and let people watch it, as long as 1) you put it behind glass and implement a 1 meter viewing distance and 2) vent any out-gassing from the spent fuel and either dilute and went it, or capture as low-level waste.
This is because after 2 000 years, the gamma emitting isotopes are practically gone. Only the alpha and beta emitters remain, and those are easilly stopped by glass and air.
Also... when Sweden picked our site to put the spent fuel, they included a local public acceptance poll. Of the two finalists, public acceptance was measured at over 87%. So, yes, some people do not at all mind having plutonium 500 meter down in the mountain, in fuel cladding, copper canisters, and bentonite padding.
In 2014 I took a Course on Nuclear waste problems from Nuclear scientist who worked at the Canadian Chalk River reactor in the 1940s. He therefore had a long history of low level radiation exposure. He however looked much younger than his age. There is evidence than low level radiation has some health benefits.
Very, very weak evidence. Might be true, but we don't have anything remotely close to firm evidence that it is true.
as an aside, plutonium is also chemically toxic too.. :)
Thanks Sabine for the wittiest and funniest way to learn technology and science!!! You are amazing!
There are a number of subduction zones. If encapsulated waste was inserted into holes drilled into the zone, are there any locations where that part of the crust would take so long before appearing in volcanic activity by which time it would be safe?
We dig Uranium up from underground, in deposits where it was naturally concentrated. Why not put our waste back in those same deposits? It's a much smaller volume than what was mined out originally. The original deposit contained mostly gangue minerals that are not radioactive, those are discarded in our refining processes. Our refined product should easily fit back in those same mines, where it was originally.
I just can't help it. I love every video you make, Sabine!! The dry humour pills just make my day even if I try to be serious about the topic. Please, keep on this track! 💜 Love from Spain.
I can't tell if it's entertaining or annoying like the drunk old lady at the bar telling you pointless story's
I worked for a US company that did long term simulations at Yucca mountain and I learned biggest problem is water and heat. Specifically rock is an insulator, so heat continues being produced over 10,000 years, and that heat very slowly spread out into the rocks, but it is possible the temperature in the repository (even without a high density of waste) can rise about the boiling point of water, and if this happens AND there is water that gets into the space in thousands of years from us it can become explosive, like old faithful, cracking rocks to the surface and potentially releasing radioactive materials.
In the London Underground the Central Line tube had a temperature of 36°C/97°F in the summer of 2018. It started with 14°C/57°F in the summer a century ago. We seem to have no intuition for that.
@@gviehmann Haha, I though about the exact same thing when reading OP's reply
@@gviehmann Is that really 100yr long-term accumulated heat from all the trains and people, or the result of more trains and usage producing a rather shorter-term equilibrium? That 36C is presumably the summer peak - what is the average and seasonal variation, and is it asymptoting yet? I know some of this heat is being used for district heating systems. Presumably we could do quite a lot more of that and thus cap the long term rock temp?
@@xxwookey Too many questions. The main point is that the temperature of the Tube is not in equilibrium, although it is an open system and there are already measures to cool it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_cooling
@@gviehmann Useful links. Which answers my main question. So the ground temp has risen from 14 to 22 (average) over 100 years. I wonder why it started at 14? UK ground temp at that latitude is 12ish. Apparently it was already unusually warm for some reason. I see they've only recently got regenerative braking which will make a huge difference to how much energy is dissipated down there.
Very informative. Still idu correlation between 3 percent long lasting and 97 percent treatable. Seems like the fuel reuse reactors the best. Doubt tectonics so reliable for long term storage. Glad no more ads based on TDS.
The Arganort reactor burns all the bad fission products, leaving nothing being a fast reactor using sodium as a cooling, apparently so the Arogonort if I have spelt it right can burn waist for energy.
I love the idea of ray cats. If some day they exist I'm sure someone will come up with the idea that they could be marketed as a vanity pet. Of course to have the full benefit of the effect you have to expose them to special materials that only exist in places hard to come by and somehow you just got an incentive to dig out the stuff earlier generations buried. You know how humanity works. They'll do it. Plan for the best, expect the worst.
That wisdom is also a reason for the idea not to record for future generations where the storage sites are.
And why I don't think creating an ominous monument over the deposit site is a good idea. It would just spark tourism, and sooner or later the tourism board of the resulting village or the manager of the "ancient spikes" casino would decide to drill for ground water in order to better serve the tourists.
@6:15 the cite of 400 M tons of hazardous waste is useful for comparison, and nonetheless omits a far larger waste stream in billions of tons that is harmful to the environment. These include the like of overburden removed off the top of coal mines, ie entire mountain tops, and other mountains of coal ash with its heavy metals etc. Mining for the materials used to make solar and wind farms will similarly have waste streams in the millions tons per year. The point is that the waste for non nuclear energy is not thousands of times larger, but a million times larger and unconfined.
@@Nill757 As I understand the video, waste from uranium mining isn't included in the comparison. Which obviously you have to do if you want to include that kind of waste from other energy sources. As for wind power, using wind power would reduce waste because wind rotors are made from fiberglass. The base for fiberglass is petroleum (oil) which is mined anyway but would have to be mined less than now because wind power replaces energy from burning oil and gas. The fibers are made from silica which is just the main ingredient of sand. There is no wasteful mining operation from using wind power compared to any other energy source maybe except hydro (which uses large amounts of concrete where the raw materials happen to be mined in wasteful mining, but concrete is used in building wind turbines too). Hoover Dam used roughly 2.5 million cubic meters of concrete and produces 2 GW electric power. A wind turbine uses 1000 cubic meters of concrete and produces 5 MW of electric power. So Hoover Dam uses 6 times more concrete per generated MW of power than wind turbines do and you can argue that wind power is even cleaner than hydro.
Unfortunately Sabine didn't elaborate whether she rather would want to live near a nuclear waste site versus living near a wind farm which would be the real benchmark for comparing risk.
@@Rechnerstrom Uranium is mined mostly insitu now, and the amount is trivial including overburden compared to any other mining relevant to energy.
@@Rechnerstrom “live near nuclear waste cite”
Currently, most nuclear spent fuel is kept in casks on the plant cite, ie a concrete can containing some rocks. Millions of people live nearby nuclear plants with these casks, which is 95% uranium no different from the U in the ground, and the residents don’t care.
Unlike the early days of wind farms which went in the most remote sites, now ever larger wind turbines are pushing up against populated areas, and they are increasingly not welcome. Some 300 proposed new wind farms have been contested by local muni, and many rejected.
Regarding material use, I often see these comparisons, and for some reason there is a seldom a wind *plus* whatever comparison, ie wind *plus* a fleet of gas plants and pipelines and storage caverns and drilling. Or, *plus* a mountain of batteries.
Then, there’s all the steel needed for new turbines, and as the old ones come down the vast majority of the blades go in landfill, soon to be millions of tons of them.
stopthesethings.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/burying-wind-turbine-blades.jpg
12:45 "Pray that the shit dilutes quickly"
I love that quote!!!
The "100,000 years" sometimes bothers me, why do we dimension storage based on plutonium becoming as radioactive as natural uranium? Wouldn't it be better to dimension it based on how long radioactivity from plutonium would be harmful to human and the environmental health? Given the assumption that no one will eat it.
I am assuming we are able to calculate: "if we have one kg of plutonium it will be this amount of dangerous and we need to store it for X amount of years" and "if we have one gram of plutonium it will be this amount of dangerous and we need to store it for Y amount of years" (Y < X). Under some other assumption that you are only allowed X amount of distance near the canister for a Y amount of time.
Is there some tool/website that can calculate how much radiotoxicity of plutonium is actually harmful compared to natural uranium? not only the amount of radiotoxicity. Answers to these questions would be highly appreciated
You might want to google "ThorCon documents nuclear waste pdf" for a good and brief introduction.
When you are among the 3 million people who live downstream from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation site along the Columbia River -the 2nd most important waterway to the North American continent next to the Mississippi River, you know all to well what “storage” of nuclear waste means after it was discovered the land it was buried in moves as well & this movement has caused barrels to burst in which that waste is now free within the dirt & heading straight forward to the Columbia River which in effect would created a nuclear wasteland overnight if just a tiny portion of that waste did reach the river, killing every living thing from Hanford to the Pacific Ocean & everything inbetween including the cities of Portland, Oregon & Vancouver, Washington with 2.5 million population of the 3 million at risk. This is the largest superfund cleanup ever undertaken by the EPA & there is no guarantee it will work as the dirt is simply being relocated to a cave dug out from dirt & rock from within the state of Nevada. You dont even want to come to this area & talk about how safe nuclear waste is unless you want a shotgun up your ass. We live it everyday. We know how safe it is, trust me, you wouldn’t want to live through the experience of what producing one atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki has done for the people who depend upon the Columbia River for pure water, hydro power, fish, & irrigation for the richest volcanic soil the most productive on the continent. Cleanup has been ongoing for decades & employs more people than production of plutonium ever has. At least another 2 more decades until it all ends at a total cost of $640-billion dollars just to cleanup the mess produced from one reactor. And you talk about safety? Please. Try living the good life here.
"The problem is: keeping an eye on those waste containers for the next 100.000 years." Omg.
Fantastic video, Sabine! Thanks a bunch! 😃
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
You need to do a video on the breeder/feeder reactors first tested at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories which produce a lot less waste.
A great Video Sabyne, very well explained - even I understood it!