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.
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.
@@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.
"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.
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!
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.
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 😂😂😂😂
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.
No product includes the costs of getting rid of it. It’s almost ridiculous that we talk about recycling and leaving out the price of it when it becomes waste. How is that suppose to work?!
Nuclear power plants do add the storage cost when building the plant. A certain percentage of the project goes to fund that handles the shutdown of the power plant, reactor decommissioning, storage of the nuclear waste, etc. So it's included on the energy price when including cost for the power plant. Usually, power plants lifecycle is way more than previously planned, so the price might show higher prices for nuclear power. What is weird to me is that countries can't work out at least one storage site per country. It's not that hard, it's safe, doesn't take much space + really cost-effective on a larger scale. If we can do this here in Finland, so can other countries. Not dealing this issue is just a political game that raises the cost for nothing.
@@Monsux You most check y information concerning waste management , costs for different countries, what went wrong with Yukka Mountain depositary, New Mexico waste depositary accident for instance and what is " included " and what is not included ... google : ccnr nuclear waste
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.
@@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.
Yucca Mountain was abandoned not because of local opposition, but because it is part of a volcanic area made up of tuff, a volcanic mineral. It was abandoned because of the high probability of a recent volcanic eruption. Not only U235&238, Pu238 to 242 are isotopes to consider: Over 100 other isotopes exist due to radioactive decay networks, and most of the decay produces Helium4, which induces gas pressure in the containers. The He4 2+ radicals due to alpha decay are emitted at a speed of about 5% of the speed of light and cause fatal damage to cells if the decay takes place in alveoli or between intestinal villus. The high risk of lethal injury from alpha decay can be understood if one knows that the conversion factor to convert the decay energy from Gray (the energy the decay induces in a calorie meter) to Sievers (the biological impact factor of a decay particle) can be up to 70 (20 for the alpha decay itself and a linear function for the maximum impact as a function of the depth of impact in the biological tissue): German StrlSchV Annex 18 C and D). In the short term, about 10% of the heavy metal is emitted as He4! This He4 has the second highest gas constant after hydrogen (2077 J/(kg K)) and will crack the containers due to the high temperature caused by the decay. Hansen and Leigh "Salt Disposal of Heat-Generating Nuclear Waste" say that in one example calculation the temperature rises by about 400°C, making such a facility impossible to manage. [Page 40 on www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1005078] Other scientists say this will happen (see the video on Pu by the Nottingham University professor). The bentonite that will be placed around the containers will also expand due to the humidity in the natural environment and will create cracks in the deposit for the emitted isotopes to escape from the cracked containers into the biosphere. I do not see the real problems being presented to the public by this video. Funny (or not) jokes cannot hide the real problems!
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.
we have now the "results" of tchernobyl..may be the worse that can happen...it is clearly "accpetable"..compare to alternative of course.. life expectancy impact per joule produced for me the point is different..to keep a nuclear plant safe you need a functional society... and we are not sure about that...
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.
@@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'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.
@@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.
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 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
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
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.
@@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.
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.
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
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.
"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!
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 😅
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.
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.
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...
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.
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!
@@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.
Thank you, Sabine! This American absolutely loves your sense of humor to go along with your discourse! Keep it up, all of us interested enjoy your videos. I will stop by occasionally.
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? :)
@@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
Main problem with nuclear waste is cost, when we pay for electric bill - we pay for energy and maintenance of grid and powerplants, and in this configuration nuclear energy is cheap, but if we would pay for nuclear waste reprocessing/recycling/storage - nuclear energy would be more expensive, and no one wants to pay more for the same.
On site dry cask storage is covered by the cost of energy. Reprocessing is 'expensive' now because native uranium is so cheap. As conventional reserves are exhausted reprocessing will become economical.
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.
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.
@@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.
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!
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
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 . . .
The underground storage will be safe in theory, for a million years. Whatever, I trust the geologists. But I am sure that humans will find a way to destroy it and release the whole waste to circulate on earth forever.
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.
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
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
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.
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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 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.
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.
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.
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).
This content is great. While it is understandable for the general public, it's still mostly unknown and mentally stimullative information. I'm loving your videos ma'am.
Thank you for a great episode Sabine! Extremely interesting about how this nuclear priesthood thing developed, had no idea that this was actually real. Also nice to know bentonite clay is being used in nuclear waste storage. I'm a ceramic artist so to me it's awesome to know that this material can be used in such a practical way for this purpose.
In fairness, 3000 years after the Bronze Age cults people are still idiots, so why not imagine they will continue to be idiots well into the future? Sociologists tend to assume that past performance indicates likely future performance
@@henrythegreatamerican8136 nuclear energy is not completely clean, nor is solar, wind, or any other not clean. What is important is whether it is sustainable, and from my point of view it absolutely is. Currently, unless we want to sacrifice our civilization, there is no other feasible solution.
Next best low waste energy source is wind. Bonus is the waste isn't deadly for 100s of thousands of years. Also the cost to build, run, and decommission.
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.
Yeah, but everything creates problems; the question is, which problems are causing less harm and easier to solve. I personally don't buy the idea killing thousands to tens of thousands of people every year (and a _lot_ more if you include air pollution) from generating electricity via coal and other fossil fuels is the better problem to have than killing an average of, well, zero people per year as nuclear power does.
Not sure if she is aware of Hanford or Sellafield. It is universally (almost) acknowledged that high level nuclear waste from spent fuel rods must be isolated from people and the environment for 100,000 years. The rule of thumb is 10 half lives. Half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years. So 100, 000 years is actually an understatement. Finland is trying to do the right thing. No-one knows whether it will succeed. Nuclear waste is a very important and insurmountable problem, she should not downplay it.
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 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 “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
Interesting vid Sabine. Have you given any thought to applying your clinical scepticism to the issues hampering Thorium reactors. Are they a thing? Do they work?? It's a rabbit hole, but you drill through those things so well
I support the motion to research this topic for an entire video's worth of facts and background. I've heard that a molten salt Thorium reactor is very safe in that the worst thing that could possibly happen to it is that it stops - no radioactive explosions are even possible. I also heard that you could just shred old nuclear weapons and spent fuel rods into them and the material would become part of the reaction until its decay to harmless stuff (that then needs to be filtered out somehow). Unfortunately I keep hearing about molten salt reactors or energy from Thorium only through sources that lack a certain scientific reputation. Seeing the matter dissected by someone like Sabine might actually contribute to our education instead of just spreading rumours.
Are they a thing? Yes. Do they work? Yes. Most important question: are they a significantly better alternative to the fossil fuels that are absolutely destroying the climate and damaging so many environments? Yes. Case closed, for anyone being rational.
@@Tao_Tology That's not an issue. Plutonium production stopped a while ago because of various strategic weapons inventory reduction treaties and the cold war ending. Governments have a surplus of plutonium now, and tend to be trying to get rid of some of it rather than make more. The main issue hindering thorium reactors is the usual cast of idiots who know little or nothing about nuclear other than "it's scary" and have decided to obstruct at all costs without actually weighing the benefits.
John, several countries are developing modular molton salt reactors, the benefits of using these reactors are immense they are being ignored by many learned people and I can't think for thr the life of me why.
But the real numbers, comparing to renewables, tell a totally different story. Sabine loves nuclear, and has not bothered to look at the economics of nuclear versus renewables.
@@luc_libv_verhaegen Could you elaborate a bit? Especially on the first sentence? and: "renewables", such as wind and solar, are inherently intermittent which has some very significant disadvantages, to say the least
@@luc_libv_verhaegen Thanks for replying - but I can't find it. I know it is not intuitive but could you link to it? ... copy paste the address next to the timestamp - which is next to your avatar name That will link to the video, with that comment thread shown first, at the top. ... or just copy/paste the content of that comment here?
My biggest "commercialisation" concern with regards to storage is the recurring underpriced proposed cost of storage - it's often 2-3x+ more costly than it ever is quoted for. This ultimately comes down to hidden costs per kWh and is bad for the consumer. An additional commercial concern includes the "non-competitiveness" of reactor design and fuel agreements. Often if you pick a reactor you're stuck with the fuel provider for the life of the plant which makes fuel cost a semi non-competitive market, which is also bad for the consumer. Nuclear also accounts for around 10% of power globally (IEA). If we were to 4x this - then we're into the 60k+ tonnes of storage needed per year. Yes, per year going by 2024 figures of consumption - and this is the minimum. This is a permanent "gift" I think no generation should have to bear. Timelines are also a relative concern with regards to the lifecycle of the plants themselves, where over 50% of the life cycle is spent in commissioning and decommissioning of the plant. Fusion, no matter how far behind, is superior in every single way. If the outcome of burning things over the past few centuries, being acknowledged as a dumb idea, for global energy consumption, fusing atoms instead of "burning" them should be a no-brainer.
Don't forget that the high level waste consisting of long half-life plutonium gives off very little radiation (or it would decay quickly). You don't want to eat it, but you could sit on a pile of it covered with a plastic sheet and not die. The short half-life stuff decays quickly, so you want to worry about being near it, but after a few half-lives, there is very little left to decay (much of the decay happens in the "cooling" pools at the reactor site for this reason.) As another comment states, there ARE a LOT of other decay products which are very dangerous, but in general, after a few decades, the stored materials are not all that hazardous -- the 200,000 years figure is sensational, but not terribly useful. The repository will not go critical if the containers are compromised -- you just want to keep the actual materials out of your water table.
This is really great. Thank you so much. I have been worried about this issue for decades. This programme makes science accessible and I also appreciate the dry sense of humour to go with all the factual stuff.
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.
My favorite storage solution I've seen is repurposing the bore holes used for fracking to store nuclear waste nearly 3 miles into the crust and then filling the bore hole with concrete. Because it is vertical too you could theoretically store the nuclear waste close to reactor sites without needing a lot of area.
I've always loved how the ideas for creating a "warning" about a nuclear waste repository completely ignores the fact that humans are impossibly curious. The weirder the warning is, the more determined future humans will be to find out what it means. And there's a point at which it's just overkill. I mean it's a warning about stuff that will kill you if you stand too close to it. It's not a warning about a portal to the plane of eldritch Lovecraftian horrors. Probably the most effective such "warning" would be a simple marker of the location. Primitive people won't be able to get in, and more advanced people will get the idea after a few of them die horribly. Even more advanced people will have a scanner and just go "Oh, there's radioactive waste here. We probably shouldn't open it."
A suggestion: Could you in the future give the specification for statistics like "90% of nuclear waste are .." with regard to .. is it 90% by weight? by item? by volume? (at around 3:00) edit nvm: she said "going by volume" before the graphic popped up :D
Overall, a pretty good video. Most of the time when I thought you missed a point you answered it shortly there after. My education is an engineering. I was the United States Naval officer on nuclear powered submarines and qualified for the operation and reactor (S5W pressurize water reactor) n the submarine. I also worked at two different commercial nuclear actors one as a BWR Three and one a BWR five. Pretty much held every Senior management position at the two plants. I also also worked in the manufacturing of BWR reactor fuel. And in uranium enrichment (both centrifuge and gaseou diffusion) On the front end of the fuel cycle: mining and enrichment. The primary hazard is alpha radiation, which is only ingested, but the major major major hazard was heavy metal poisoning from uranium similar to lead. You also had to worry about nuclear critical safety. Overall, very good video. Thank you. Navy reactors were great. They’re like Ferrari engines. That’s where you have fun.
Thank you, Sabine. As we look to alternatives to fossil fuels for our energy needs, most people recognize that nuclear fission has numerous advantages over solar or wind. It's the waste issue that's always brought up, and rightfully so. Putting that issue into perspective is extremely important, and you've done that here. Again, thanks.
@@deathsinger1192 there's not enough solar and wind to supply our country's needs plus there are storage requirements needed to match supply and demand. Fusion is the best answer longer term.
@@rand49er idk about fusion, guess that will still take fourty years, but if the atomic fans are now allowed to constantly present their utopian world reactors, I'll also say that it would be ridiculously simple in theory to supply the whole world with solar power, 90% of the world population lives in 3000 kilometer range of a desert and like 500km*500km would be enough for everyone, considering how many reactors and reactors to handle the reactors waste and storages would be needed to achieve the same with nuclear energy, I think solar might be it after all, also there are at least as many ideas to store energy as there are new concepts for nuclear reactors popping up everyday and each of those is probably as advanced as well, so I just don't see where nuclear energy would be needed
@@deathsinger1192 apparently you don't know much about fusion energy. The waste is much less of a problem with many advances possible to reduce it even more. We can't recycle solar panels and wind turbines. Final thought: be objective.
@@deathsinger1192and that's why we leave this stuff to smarter people than you. Ones who understand why making half a continent a giant solar farm would be catastrophic
I think the best way to store the used nuclear fuel is to put it deep enough underground, say 2km. This will produce a lift shaft long enough so that if you fill it with concrete, once you're done filling the storage, you better be technologically advanced if you wanna dig it back out. If you put the storage in a place that is a valley or a base of a mountain to begin with, not even geological processes should be able to dig the stuff out before the fuel is safe.
Such underground storage has a problem, no matter in which way it's done: what if plans go wrong? As this is something unexpected, there's no way to plan for it. That's why I favor storing waste where it currently is: inside those decommissioned power plants. If something goes wrong, one has access and can rearrange the setup. That said: the most important step would be to stop mining Uranium.
@@Polygarden Yea I'm not too impressed by German engineering since I got to actually work with it. 1km is a bit too shallow for stuff you never want to see again, and obviously if water leakage is a problem, the material isn't packed well enough. Ideally the material should be packed so that even if it's submerged in water for the rest of its existence, and the storage tunnels collapse on it, the container carrying it won't fail. If we can make these things train proof, shouldn't be a problem to make them waterproof. Not to mention they're heavy metals. They're not too excited about going upwards. Even such a lame thing as sand can prevent these materials from getting anywhere, as we have learned from natural nuclear reactors. As far as I know it was found the material didn't get further than 30cm, over 200000 years in soil where water flowed freely.
@@traumflug Yes we can stop mining uranium and then we could start building weed huts and live the simple life. What if there's going to be a war or a revolution that changes the landscape and the decommissioned power plants fall into disrepair? What if thieves get in and start selling that stuff for scrap? That have happened to quite a few radioactive sources. And not just Chernobyl scrap, but also medical equipment. Not to mention keeping up those places ain't cheap, you wanna do it for 100k years? Those facilities have a life expectancy of up to 100 years tops. That's your plan? Sounds like a garbage plan to me. Not to mention EV's are coming and you'd be pretty naive to think solar panels will do the trick. Certainly not when the grid looks like the way it does. Fusion power is as usually 30 years away, natural gas is a heavy pollutant both before and after burning and all of those alternative tidal things are still experimental toys. And what about countries that can't access enough renewable resources? Suuure we're gonna depend on the other states, like say Germany. Because they are demonstrating just now how to save the day while they drag Europe down into a debt we'll be fixing for the next fifty years. All because they hate the good things while running the largest surface coal mine on the planet. Or everybody else in the EU playing on their own sand the second some trouble pop up completely unable to cooperate on the problem of electric power. I don't know man I think my plan of going nuclear is a bit better thought through than yours.
@@Killerean Obviously, these storage sites in Germany were considered to be safe in all aspects. Else nobody had stored this waste there. Nevertheless these engineers were wrong. And that's the problem for all engineering: engineers might be wrong again.
It's such an irony that the same people who go to extreme measures save the climate are opposed to nuclear energy. Abandoning nuclear energy is one of Germany's many political mistakes.
Being against nuclear energy was invented by Sowjet Russia. To be against western (US) Nuclear missiles and against nuclear energy in general was brought to western Germany by Stasi and KGB. Back in the 1980s… Russians then wanted to substitute our NPPS with Gas PPs, running on Russian gas… 😩 Got the schizophrenia amongst greens? Most of the founders of that party were communist and infiltrated by the east
Hello! Would it be possible to explain the opposite end off the issue? Who produces "fuel" for reactors, who owns the stocks, who has possiblility to make political influence because of that e.g. on Germany and on whole EU??? Is it interesting topic for any-one? Kind greetings for Everyone and flowers for Mrs. Hossenfelder: 💐❤ 👍
@@ztheiss Is there a monopoly on solar panels? Is there a monopoly on wind turbines? Is there a monopoly on hydropowerplant construction? Is there a monopoly on deep drilling for geothermal power? There certainly is not a monopoly on fuel production for those types of energy generation; they don't need any.
The IAEA has a map on their website showing all known deposits of uranium. The EU has loads of it, even Ireland is rumored to have enough in Co. Donegal to last for centuries.
right. notice how Sabine compares living near a chemical plant that seems to fuck up on the reg, with living near nuclear waste stored precisely according to specs and not dumped off a derailed train.
Atomic engineers have been concerned about those for a long time, especially after Chernobyl, which is why nuclear reactors are specifically made to resist missile strikes and collisions with airliners. Even the Ukraine war has shown this to us, fighting has happened literally around the main Zhaporizhya plant with no accident happening to the reactor
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.
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.
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Interesting, thanks for your comment!
The dry storage has nothing on the dryness of your humour and I love it ❤️
Yeah, that sass.
In Germany this is stand -up. And she kills it !!
"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.
you will have no shortage of vileness to love
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!
So we've been told... I am sure I can fl.....y THUMP.
How do you know? Try it.
We lack sufficient evidence that this is true
"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
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.😂
@@One.Zero.One101used Uranium rods could be re-used in thorium reactors that would incinerate plutonium. (Source Wikipedia)
“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.
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.
No product includes the costs of getting rid of it. It’s almost ridiculous that we talk about recycling and leaving out the price of it when it becomes waste. How is that suppose to work?!
@@muertito8077 Her problem is not your problem and vice versa. No solution for now and any compromise is for futur generations " to solve ".
Nuclear power plants do add the storage cost when building the plant. A certain percentage of the project goes to fund that handles the shutdown of the power plant, reactor decommissioning, storage of the nuclear waste, etc. So it's included on the energy price when including cost for the power plant. Usually, power plants lifecycle is way more than previously planned, so the price might show higher prices for nuclear power.
What is weird to me is that countries can't work out at least one storage site per country. It's not that hard, it's safe, doesn't take much space + really cost-effective on a larger scale. If we can do this here in Finland, so can other countries. Not dealing this issue is just a political game that raises the cost for nothing.
@@Monsux You most check y information concerning waste management , costs for different countries, what went wrong with Yukka Mountain depositary, New Mexico waste depositary accident for instance and what is " included " and what is not included ... google : ccnr nuclear waste
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.
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
Yucca Mountain was abandoned not because of local opposition, but because it is part of a volcanic area made up of tuff, a volcanic mineral. It was abandoned because of the high probability of a recent volcanic eruption.
Not only U235&238, Pu238 to 242 are isotopes to consider: Over 100 other isotopes exist due to radioactive decay networks, and most of the decay produces Helium4, which induces gas pressure in the containers. The He4 2+ radicals due to alpha decay are emitted at a speed of about 5% of the speed of light and cause fatal damage to cells if the decay takes place in alveoli or between intestinal villus. The high risk of lethal injury from alpha decay can be understood if one knows that the conversion factor to convert the decay energy from Gray (the energy the decay induces in a calorie meter) to Sievers (the biological impact factor of a decay particle) can be up to 70 (20 for the alpha decay itself and a linear function for the maximum impact as a function of the depth of impact in the biological tissue): German StrlSchV Annex 18 C and D). In the short term, about 10% of the heavy metal is emitted as He4! This He4 has the second highest gas constant after hydrogen (2077 J/(kg K)) and will crack the containers due to the high temperature caused by the decay.
Hansen and Leigh "Salt Disposal of Heat-Generating Nuclear Waste" say that in one example calculation the temperature rises by about 400°C, making such a facility impossible to manage.
[Page 40 on www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1005078]
Other scientists say this will happen (see the video on Pu by the Nottingham University professor). The bentonite that will be placed around the containers will also expand due to the humidity in the natural environment and will create cracks in the deposit for the emitted isotopes to escape from the cracked containers into the biosphere.
I do not see the real problems being presented to the public by this video. Funny (or not) jokes cannot 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?
@@ForbiddTV please stop commenting bs. there are already enough misconceptions about nuclear science
"Close the window and hope the shit dissipates quickly" Sabine.
we have now the "results" of tchernobyl..may be the worse that can happen...it is clearly "accpetable"..compare to alternative of course.. life expectancy impact per joule produced
for me the point is different..to keep a nuclear plant safe you need a functional society... and we are not sure about that...
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'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 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.
I love your dry humor 🙂 "Don't eat used fuel rods" and "all the passengers would be dead"
Common sense advice.
"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.
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 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 😉
Came for the nuclear waste education, stayed for the 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!
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
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.
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
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.
"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 😅
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.
Your humor is brilliant sabine. Just dissapointed that I can't eat fuel rods. No healthy green glow for me.
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...
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.
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.
Thank you, Sabine! This American absolutely loves your sense of humor to go along with your discourse! Keep it up, all of us interested enjoy your videos. I will stop by occasionally.
"This right-wing American conspiracy-theorist crackpot..." - there, fixed that for ya...
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
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.
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
Main problem with nuclear waste is cost, when we pay for electric bill - we pay for energy and maintenance of grid and powerplants, and in this configuration nuclear energy is cheap, but if we would pay for nuclear waste reprocessing/recycling/storage - nuclear energy would be more expensive, and no one wants to pay more for the same.
On site dry cask storage is covered by the cost of energy. Reprocessing is 'expensive' now because native uranium is so cheap. As conventional reserves are exhausted reprocessing will become economical.
And every time a dollar passes through a set of hands a penny sticks...
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).
Don't, it's brain washing...
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
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.
Biggest mistake humans ever made was dismantling and not building new plants when needed
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.
The underground storage will be safe in theory, for a million years. Whatever, I trust the geologists. But I am sure that humans will find a way to destroy it and release the whole waste to circulate on earth forever.
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.
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
Subduction zone volcanic chains will now make Geiger counter go brrrrrrrrr
Thanks for all the links in the description. Many vloggers promise those, yet few actually provide them.
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
I will absolutely watch a 2 hour lecture from you
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.
An intelligent lady with a sense of humour. Nice to see.
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.
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.
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. :-)
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.
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.
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).
9:10 As a train fan I am very aware of that test crash but I have never seen the footage at the angles you have shown. Thank you!
Very impressive, Sabine Had a good laugh that I never expected, only you can make a topic as this entertaining, well done, and thank you
her name is sabine..
This content is great. While it is understandable for the general public, it's still mostly unknown and mentally stimullative information. I'm loving your videos ma'am.
Thank you for a great episode Sabine! Extremely interesting about how this nuclear priesthood thing developed, had no idea that this was actually real. Also nice to know bentonite clay is being used in nuclear waste storage. I'm a ceramic artist so to me it's awesome to know that this material can be used in such a practical way for this purpose.
How do we get people to do what we want? Start a religion! A solution as old as us.
Easiest solution is to place the nuclear waste in the backyards of politicians who lie and say it's clean energy.
In fairness, 3000 years after the Bronze Age cults people are still idiots, so why not imagine they will continue to be idiots well into the future? Sociologists tend to assume that past performance indicates likely future performance
@@henrythegreatamerican8136 nuclear energy is not completely clean, nor is solar, wind, or any other not clean.
What is important is whether it is sustainable, and from my point of view it absolutely is. Currently, unless we want to sacrifice our civilization, there is no other feasible solution.
Next best low waste energy source is wind. Bonus is the waste isn't deadly for 100s of thousands of years. Also the cost to build, run, and decommission.
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
Glad Sabine figured out what I realized as a fresh college grad in 1985. Of course, I did have the advantage of interning at a nuke plant.
Nothing will get me to believe the word combinations of "permanent" and "accumulating" translate to "not a problem"
Yeah, but everything creates problems; the question is, which problems are causing less harm and easier to solve.
I personally don't buy the idea killing thousands to tens of thousands of people every year (and a _lot_ more if you include air pollution) from generating electricity via coal and other fossil fuels is the better problem to have than killing an average of, well, zero people per year as nuclear power does.
Not sure if she is aware of Hanford or Sellafield. It is universally (almost) acknowledged that high level nuclear waste from spent fuel rods must be isolated from people and the environment for 100,000 years. The rule of thumb is 10 half lives. Half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years. So 100, 000 years is actually an understatement. Finland is trying to do the right thing. No-one knows whether it will succeed. Nuclear waste is a very important and insurmountable problem, she should not downplay it.
This video needs more views. It is valuable information and there are a lot of misconceptions about nuclear power this helps dispel.
That is an excellent and extremely cogent explanation of the waste issue. Thank you!
.... It's not waste!!! People really need to stop calling it that.
In addition to your excellent sense of humor and competence, your wardrobe is genuinely excellent. Great upload as always.
Fantastic video, Sabine! Thanks a bunch! 😃
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
"The problem is: keeping an eye on those waste containers for the next 100.000 years." Omg.
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??"
I'm sure someone else has noted this, but the Keith Richards reference was a classic. Delivered in a very German manner. Love your work.
I don't know why, but I love her accent... That and she's cute (IMO).
Your down bad that's why pal
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
Interesting vid Sabine. Have you given any thought to applying your clinical scepticism to the issues hampering Thorium reactors. Are they a thing? Do they work?? It's a rabbit hole, but you drill through those things so well
I support the motion to research this topic for an entire video's worth of facts and background. I've heard that a molten salt Thorium reactor is very safe in that the worst thing that could possibly happen to it is that it stops - no radioactive explosions are even possible. I also heard that you could just shred old nuclear weapons and spent fuel rods into them and the material would become part of the reaction until its decay to harmless stuff (that then needs to be filtered out somehow). Unfortunately I keep hearing about molten salt reactors or energy from Thorium only through sources that lack a certain scientific reputation. Seeing the matter dissected by someone like Sabine might actually contribute to our education instead of just spreading rumours.
Are they a thing? Yes.
Do they work? Yes.
Most important question: are they a significantly better alternative to the fossil fuels that are absolutely destroying the climate and damaging so many environments? Yes.
Case closed, for anyone being rational.
Cynically, I think a big 'issue' hampering wider thorium use is that it doesn't help with nuclear weapons.
@@Tao_Tology That's not an issue. Plutonium production stopped a while ago because of various strategic weapons inventory reduction treaties and the cold war ending. Governments have a surplus of plutonium now, and tend to be trying to get rid of some of it rather than make more.
The main issue hindering thorium reactors is the usual cast of idiots who know little or nothing about nuclear other than "it's scary" and have decided to obstruct at all costs without actually weighing the benefits.
John, several countries are developing modular molton salt reactors, the benefits of using these reactors are immense they are being ignored by many learned people and I can't think for thr the life of me why.
As you said: next best thing to superpowers are numbers. Thanks for that, I hope this video goes viral (and in the heads)
But the real numbers, comparing to renewables, tell a totally different story. Sabine loves nuclear, and has not bothered to look at the economics of nuclear versus renewables.
A number means nothing without the understanding of its representation
@@luc_libv_verhaegen Could you elaborate a bit? Especially on the first sentence?
and: "renewables", such as wind and solar, are inherently intermittent
which has some very significant disadvantages, to say the least
@@jonathanjomen See my back-of-the-napkin calculation as a toplevel comment for the details of that.
@@luc_libv_verhaegen Thanks for replying - but I can't find it.
I know it is not intuitive but
could you link to it?
... copy paste the address next to the timestamp - which is next to your avatar name
That will link to the video, with that comment thread shown first, at the top.
... or just copy/paste the content of that comment here?
My biggest "commercialisation" concern with regards to storage is the recurring underpriced proposed cost of storage - it's often 2-3x+ more costly than it ever is quoted for. This ultimately comes down to hidden costs per kWh and is bad for the consumer. An additional commercial concern includes the "non-competitiveness" of reactor design and fuel agreements. Often if you pick a reactor you're stuck with the fuel provider for the life of the plant which makes fuel cost a semi non-competitive market, which is also bad for the consumer.
Nuclear also accounts for around 10% of power globally (IEA). If we were to 4x this - then we're into the 60k+ tonnes of storage needed per year. Yes, per year going by 2024 figures of consumption - and this is the minimum. This is a permanent "gift" I think no generation should have to bear.
Timelines are also a relative concern with regards to the lifecycle of the plants themselves, where over 50% of the life cycle is spent in commissioning and decommissioning of the plant.
Fusion, no matter how far behind, is superior in every single way. If the outcome of burning things over the past few centuries, being acknowledged as a dumb idea, for global energy consumption, fusing atoms instead of "burning" them should be a no-brainer.
Good informative stuff, as always. I dug the Keith Richards joke.
Love your work!
It's a bit like a water mill, but more dangerous...I love it!
Not much use for grinding grain into flour however.
@@CAThompson As they'd say in the west of Ireland, "well, you'll have that"
Actually, the dams are more dangerous, how many people have died when hydroelectric power stations fail, lots
@@paulhawkins6415 Never thought of that. 🙁
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.
Sabine you could have a second career as a comedian. Your delivery is awesome.
Thanks for a often humoristic presentation or a serious (though perceived so) matter. Most enlightening and entertaining.
Thanks Sabine for the wittiest and funniest way to learn technology and science!!! You are amazing!
Don't forget that the high level waste consisting of long half-life plutonium gives off very little radiation (or it would decay quickly). You don't want to eat it, but you could sit on a pile of it covered with a plastic sheet and not die. The short half-life stuff decays quickly, so you want to worry about being near it, but after a few half-lives, there is very little left to decay (much of the decay happens in the "cooling" pools at the reactor site for this reason.) As another comment states, there ARE a LOT of other decay products which are very dangerous, but in general, after a few decades, the stored materials are not all that hazardous -- the 200,000 years figure is sensational, but not terribly useful. The repository will not go critical if the containers are compromised -- you just want to keep the actual materials out of your water table.
as an aside, plutonium is also chemically toxic too.. :)
This is really great. Thank you so much. I have been worried about this issue for decades. This programme makes science accessible and I also appreciate the dry sense of humour to go with all the factual stuff.
Best documentary I've ever seen! Great content delivered with a touch of humor! I'm subscribing.
This was just fantastic. Thank you for providing this wonderful public service.
Where has this woman been all my life? LOVE this stuff! Thanks so much for the interesting explanations and humor. Big fan!
well as long as you behave you may find out some day🤣
Why? Because she has a pretty look about her?
@@adbogo just eat it you'll be fine for a day or two🤣🤣🤣
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.
New facilities can be created to replace old ones by simply building around the previous facility.
An excellent and informative episode.
My favorite storage solution I've seen is repurposing the bore holes used for fracking to store nuclear waste nearly 3 miles into the crust and then filling the bore hole with concrete. Because it is vertical too you could theoretically store the nuclear waste close to reactor sites without needing a lot of area.
I've always loved how the ideas for creating a "warning" about a nuclear waste repository completely ignores the fact that humans are impossibly curious. The weirder the warning is, the more determined future humans will be to find out what it means. And there's a point at which it's just overkill. I mean it's a warning about stuff that will kill you if you stand too close to it. It's not a warning about a portal to the plane of eldritch Lovecraftian horrors.
Probably the most effective such "warning" would be a simple marker of the location. Primitive people won't be able to get in, and more advanced people will get the idea after a few of them die horribly. Even more advanced people will have a scanner and just go "Oh, there's radioactive waste here. We probably shouldn't open it."
Thanks! I never get tired of your channel Sabine. Keep it up.
A suggestion: Could you in the future give the specification for statistics like "90% of nuclear waste are .." with regard to .. is it 90% by weight? by item? by volume? (at around 3:00)
edit nvm: she said "going by volume" before the graphic popped up :D
I assume it's by weight, in tons, as all the other figures in video.
By activity
Just a few seconds before, at 2:53, she says "going by volume".
@@coolaun ah thanks very much, I didn't catch that :)
Overall, a pretty good video. Most of the time when I thought you missed a point you answered it shortly there after. My education is an engineering. I was the United States Naval officer on nuclear powered submarines and qualified for the operation and reactor (S5W pressurize water reactor) n the submarine. I also worked at two different commercial nuclear actors one as a BWR
Three and one a BWR five. Pretty much held every Senior management position at the two plants. I also also worked in the manufacturing of BWR reactor fuel. And in uranium enrichment (both centrifuge and gaseou diffusion)
On the front end of the fuel cycle: mining and enrichment. The primary hazard is alpha radiation, which is only ingested, but the major major major hazard was heavy metal poisoning from uranium similar to lead. You also had to worry about nuclear critical safety.
Overall, very good video. Thank you.
Navy reactors were great. They’re like Ferrari engines. That’s where you have fun.
Thanks for this young lady! The more I go down the 'rabbit hole' on nuclear, the more times I ask myself, "WHY IN THE WORLD ARE WE NOT USING THIS?"
Fukushima is a prime example! Is has been & will continue dump hundreds of tonnes of radioactive waste directly into the ocean every day.
"Oil" make many money for few...
Nuke make many money for most...
Not good for king and queen.
Because of the problems of waste disposal.
Thank you, Sabine. As we look to alternatives to fossil fuels for our energy needs, most people recognize that nuclear fission has numerous advantages over solar or wind. It's the waste issue that's always brought up, and rightfully so. Putting that issue into perspective is extremely important, and you've done that here. Again, thanks.
the advantages over solar and wind are the following:
@@deathsinger1192 there's not enough solar and wind to supply our country's needs plus there are storage requirements needed to match supply and demand. Fusion is the best answer longer term.
@@rand49er idk about fusion, guess that will still take fourty years, but if the atomic fans are now allowed to constantly present their utopian world reactors, I'll also say that it would be ridiculously simple in theory to supply the whole world with solar power, 90% of the world population lives in 3000 kilometer range of a desert and like 500km*500km would be enough for everyone, considering how many reactors and reactors to handle the reactors waste and storages would be needed to achieve the same with nuclear energy, I think solar might be it after all, also there are at least as many ideas to store energy as there are new concepts for nuclear reactors popping up everyday and each of those is probably as advanced as well, so I just don't see where nuclear energy would be needed
@@deathsinger1192 apparently you don't know much about fusion energy. The waste is much less of a problem with many advances possible to reduce it even more. We can't recycle solar panels and wind turbines. Final thought: be objective.
@@deathsinger1192and that's why we leave this stuff to smarter people than you. Ones who understand why making half a continent a giant solar farm would be catastrophic
I think the best way to store the used nuclear fuel is to put it deep enough underground, say 2km. This will produce a lift shaft long enough so that if you fill it with concrete, once you're done filling the storage, you better be technologically advanced if you wanna dig it back out. If you put the storage in a place that is a valley or a base of a mountain to begin with, not even geological processes should be able to dig the stuff out before the fuel is safe.
Such underground storage has a problem, no matter in which way it's done: what if plans go wrong? As this is something unexpected, there's no way to plan for it. That's why I favor storing waste where it currently is: inside those decommissioned power plants. If something goes wrong, one has access and can rearrange the setup.
That said: the most important step would be to stop mining Uranium.
@@Polygarden Yea I'm not too impressed by German engineering since I got to actually work with it. 1km is a bit too shallow for stuff you never want to see again, and obviously if water leakage is a problem, the material isn't packed well enough. Ideally the material should be packed so that even if it's submerged in water for the rest of its existence, and the storage tunnels collapse on it, the container carrying it won't fail. If we can make these things train proof, shouldn't be a problem to make them waterproof. Not to mention they're heavy metals. They're not too excited about going upwards. Even such a lame thing as sand can prevent these materials from getting anywhere, as we have learned from natural nuclear reactors. As far as I know it was found the material didn't get further than 30cm, over 200000 years in soil where water flowed freely.
@@traumflug Yes we can stop mining uranium and then we could start building weed huts and live the simple life.
What if there's going to be a war or a revolution that changes the landscape and the decommissioned power plants fall into disrepair? What if thieves get in and start selling that stuff for scrap? That have happened to quite a few radioactive sources. And not just Chernobyl scrap, but also medical equipment. Not to mention keeping up those places ain't cheap, you wanna do it for 100k years? Those facilities have a life expectancy of up to 100 years tops. That's your plan? Sounds like a garbage plan to me. Not to mention EV's are coming and you'd be pretty naive to think solar panels will do the trick. Certainly not when the grid looks like the way it does. Fusion power is as usually 30 years away, natural gas is a heavy pollutant both before and after burning and all of those alternative tidal things are still experimental toys. And what about countries that can't access enough renewable resources? Suuure we're gonna depend on the other states, like say Germany. Because they are demonstrating just now how to save the day while they drag Europe down into a debt we'll be fixing for the next fifty years. All because they hate the good things while running the largest surface coal mine on the planet. Or everybody else in the EU playing on their own sand the second some trouble pop up completely unable to cooperate on the problem of electric power. I don't know man I think my plan of going nuclear is a bit better thought through than yours.
@@Killerean Obviously, these storage sites in Germany were considered to be safe in all aspects. Else nobody had stored this waste there. Nevertheless these engineers were wrong. And that's the problem for all engineering: engineers might be wrong again.
@@Killerean Weed huts because there's no nuclear? Please return here when you can be taken seriously.
It's such an irony that the same people who go to extreme measures save the climate are opposed to nuclear energy. Abandoning nuclear energy is one of Germany's many political mistakes.
Being against nuclear energy was invented by Sowjet Russia. To be against western (US) Nuclear missiles and against nuclear energy in general was brought to western Germany by Stasi and KGB. Back in the 1980s…
Russians then wanted to substitute our NPPS with Gas PPs, running on Russian gas… 😩
Got the schizophrenia amongst greens? Most of the founders of that party were communist and infiltrated by the east
Hello!
Would it be possible to explain the opposite end off the issue? Who produces "fuel" for reactors, who owns the stocks, who has possiblility to make political influence because of that e.g. on Germany and on whole EU??? Is it interesting topic for any-one?
Kind greetings for Everyone and flowers for Mrs. Hossenfelder: 💐❤
👍
Thanks for the interesting suggestion, I will keep that in mind!
@@SabineHossenfelder
Thank You 🙂
I suggested that topic because I'm so much worried about Germany and UE 😞 ❤
@@SabineHossenfelder Yes, and compare that to the stranglehold fossil fuel and "green energy" companies currently have...
@@ztheiss Is there a monopoly on solar panels?
Is there a monopoly on wind turbines?
Is there a monopoly on hydropowerplant construction?
Is there a monopoly on deep drilling for geothermal power?
There certainly is not a monopoly on fuel production for those types of energy generation; they don't need any.
The IAEA has a map on their website showing all known deposits of uranium. The EU has loads of it, even Ireland is rumored to have enough in Co. Donegal to last for centuries.
Normally, I would categorize your videos as science but this one should go in the comedy category 😆
I'm more concerned with war, terrorism and natural disasters causing melt downs than what we do with the waste material.
The danger of those things is not as great as you might think.
Reactors can be shut down, you know.
right. notice how Sabine compares living near a chemical plant that seems to fuck up on the reg, with living near nuclear waste stored precisely according to specs and not dumped off a derailed train.
Atomic engineers have been concerned about those for a long time, especially after Chernobyl, which is why nuclear reactors are specifically made to resist missile strikes and collisions with airliners. Even the Ukraine war has shown this to us, fighting has happened literally around the main Zhaporizhya plant with no accident happening to the reactor