What to Do With All This Nuclear Waste?  ## Metadata - Author: [[Stuff You Should Know]] - Full Title: What to Do With All This Nuclear Waste? - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/1a1dc015-03f2-4d84-82d5-52d46efc9758 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Small Volume, Big Problem** - Spent nuclear fuel is solid metal pellets that lose efficiency after years but remain highly radioactive. - Each U.S. person’s lifetime nuclear waste compresses to roughly a hockey puck worth of material. Transcript: Josh Clark Yeah, it turns out that nuclear waste doesn't really look like that. It certainly doesn't glow green. Probably the closest you could get to what The Simpsons depict, and not just The Simpsons, I think. The classic movie Men at Work featuring brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen. Never saw it. It's good. As far as 80s comedies go, it's pretty good. Yeah. All right. And they play a lot of two live crew, too. Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant Oh, wow. There you go. Josh Clark Because I think it takes place in Miami. I'm not sure. But the closest you can get to that, from what I can tell, is sludge. Toxic nuclear sludge that is described as having kind of a peanut buttery consistency. Which is gross and dangerous, you know? Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant Yeah, it's not a sandwich you want, unless you cut the crust off. Josh Clark So for the most part, though, nuclear waste is solid. It's like pellets of solid, essentially metal material made up of a bunch of different elements and metals and all sorts of crud pressed together to form essentially a uranium fuel Is what it starts out as. But after it undergoes nuclear fission for five or six years, it says, I'm spent. ([Time 0:02:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d2fab134-4097-45e8-8d8c-a9aef15fe59a)) - **Cooling First, Store Later** - Spent fuel moves from reactor cores to deep, water-filled spent fuel pools to cool and prevent criticality. - Pools hold assemblies for years before transfer into inert-gas-filled dry casks for interim storage. Transcript: Josh Clark Yes. Very fortunately, they don't just take these fuel assemblies and toss them out back into an ever-growing pile. They kind of do, but there's a little more to it. What they do initially is, so remember these things are underwater, and they're underwater for a reason, not just to carry out the chain reaction that produces power, but also to keep Them from going critical. So they're moved from the reactor core to what are called spent fuel pools. I want to say spent fuel pules every time I say that out loud, but I can't. And they never leave the water. They're taking down these special canals that connect the reactor core to the spent fuel pools and just add a little charm to it. They actually attach them to the bottom of a gondola that takes it through the canal. It is very cute. And then once they get to the spent fuel pool, they're basically dropped into this huge pool, stainless steel pool that has about 40 feet of water in it. And they're, I don't know, I think about 10 feet or so tall. So they sink down to the bottom, they've got 20, 30 feet of water over them. And they stay there for years because they're so hot and they're so radioactive. It would be insane to do anything else with them, but basically put them in the pools and let them sit there for a while. Yeah. Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant You can look up a picture of a spent fuel pool and it's really cool looking. And like you said, I mean, two to five years just for these things to cool off. They decay a little bit as far as the radioactivity goes, but, you know, that's a process that for the most critical stuff that takes, you know, thousands of years. So it's really just a blip of radioactivity that decays in that two to five years. But what they're really doing is cooling that stuff down, because if they even pulled it out to transport it and didn't do so in a canal, it seems like it would just combust, right? Isn't that the idea? Josh Clark Yeah, a fuel assembly, especially a bunch of fuel assemblies exposed to air, would just produce so much heat that they would blow up. And when they blew up, remember these are fairly recent spent fuel rods. They would release a lot of really bad stuff, like cesium-137. That spreads in the air very quickly. It settles into the environment very quickly. It enters the food chain and it causes all sorts of problems when it enters the body and it sticks around for a while. It's one of the big problems with nuclear waste. So you want to keep those spent fuel assemblies underwater for basically as long as you possibly can before you put them into basically dry dock. And this is where essentially what I was saying, where they just toss them out back. That's what they do, but they put them into something called a dry cask first. And it's a little more technical than just throwing it into a pile, but it's in principle roughly the same thing. Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant That's very funny to me that you keep liking it to throwing it out back in a pile. Josh Clark Because that's what they're doing, man. Like these dry casks, it goes from a pool to a dry cask on the same site. And they just sit there in the dry cask like, okay, you stay here until we can figure out what to do with you 100 years from now. Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant So for the first couple of decades that we had this stuff, all of it was just in those cooling pools. But those pools started to fill up. They're all on site. You know, it's not like they have to transport them except, you know, very locally via canal. And then they said, hey, these pools are filling up. We've got to come up with a better way. They started looking into the dry cask method in the 70s, and I think in 86 in the United States at the Surrey Nuclear Power Plant in Virginia is where we had our first dry storage facility. And these casks are about 20 feet tall, eight feet in diameter, weigh about 100 tons. And in that cask is several dozen of those fuel assemblies. And again, those fuel assemblies are made up of the individual fuel rods that are holding the pellets. So several dozen of those stack together, sealed inside a canister. They bolt it shut, suck out the air and replace it with inert gas. And then that steel canister is surrounded by a thick concrete wall and they throw it out back. Josh Clark Right. They stand it up out back. And the inert gas acts as a coolant rather than using water, which would corrode things. The inert gas can also absorb the radiation and the heat. And then the concrete they use is like very special concrete with polymer fibers and added boron to make it even denser. And then they also mix in magnetite and barite to essentially absorb radioactive particles. So it's like the dry casks are pretty good. As far as I know, though, they're only rated for about 100 years of storage. After that, they're like, we're not guaranteeing anything. And so I think you said the first one was sealed up in 1986? ([Time 0:10:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2a9a0636-11fc-4c61-9e45-efd7e94bf455)) - **Politics Broke The Permanent Plan** - U.S. permanent disposal (Yucca Mountain) was politicized and canceled, leaving spent fuel policy frozen. - Consolidated interim sites in Texas and New Mexico are proposed but only buy limited time. Transcript: Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant And in fact, that's the one that the U.S. Was working on inside the Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and it had NRC and EPA approval, but Nevada said, nope, we don't want that here. Obama canceled it in 2010, and so far we don't have a new sort of, again, scare quote, permanent solution here in the U.S. Josh Clark Yeah, the big problem is in 1987 Congress said Yucca Mountain is the only site that the DOE and the NRC can use to dispose of nuclear waste. You can't put it anywhere else geologically for long-term storage. And then they never went back and said, well, since we're not going to put it at Yucca Mountain, we'll do it here instead. So it's just totally in limbo. So in the interim, literally these interim storage sites, like you said, in Texas and New Mexico, that's kind of the next big hope after the dry casks. I think the one in New Mexico will be capable of containing 120,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, which is a lot, especially considering that the U.S. Has only about 90,000 tons of spent fuel total. But we're also adding about 2,000 tons a year. ([Time 0:17:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/05ce536f-5862-4229-976b-b95581577c84)) - **Finland’s Deep Rock Approach** - Finland’s Onkalo will place canisters ~1,430 feet in bedrock, surround them with copper, then seal with expanding bentonite clay. - The design depends on geology and long-term material behavior assumptions. Transcript: Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant And it's the first, on planet Earth, geologic repository where supposedly, you know, they say that you can store this stuff, you know, close to 1,500 feet down under the Earth in the Bedrock. And that stuff's been there for millions of years, so this stuff should be pretty good down there. Josh Clark Yeah, and I mean, they're like in the bedrock. They're talking about 1,430 feet down, which for reference is 220 times deeper than the depth of an Olympic swimming pool. The spent fuel assemblies are put into steel canisters. To show off Finland surrounds them with a two-inch thick layer of copper because copper won't corrode in the anaerobic conditions down 1,430 feet under the ground. Once they get to that 1,430 feet depth, they go into shafts that are another 30 feet deep, which is 4.6 times deeper than an Olympic pool. And then they stack the canisters one on top of each other. Finally, they top off that 30-foot deep shaft, and then they fill them with bentonite, which is a clever thing to add because it's compressed clay that essentially, you remember those Little dinosaur sponges that were really tiny, and then you drop water on them, and they turn into like a full-size Tyrannosaurus rex? Yeah. It's like that, but it's the clay version of that. When it makes contact with water, it expands. And as it expands, it will form a seal around the canisters. ([Time 0:21:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e8159c0c-c3e3-4423-912f-b0fb8262eaf7)) - **Danger Depends On The Isotope** - Radioactive hazard varies by isotope; some decay in decades while others persist millions of years. - Safety claims depend on which isotopes you prioritize, so longevity estimates vary widely. Transcript: Josh Clark Right, which is just wrong. It depends on what source you go to, and it's not clear like one's from one side and one's from another side. It really depends on the source. Some people say nuclear waste is really just dangerous for the first few decades. Other people say a thousand years. Other people say tens of thousands of years. Other people point out that an isotope of uranium, I think 236 or 8, has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. So it depends on who you talk to, just how long this stuff is really toxic for. But it seems like the stuff that the people are most concerned of are things like iodine-129, which has a half-life of 15 million years. It's not good. But then on the other hand, you have cesium-131, I think I mentioned earlier, that that is really easy to get into the environment. So it causes a lot of problems. So does iodine 129. But it has a half-life of, I think, like 30 years. So as long, and a lot of the worst stuff actually goes away while it's in those pools for the first few years. ([Time 0:24:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ae36f52d-de78-486a-b478-d3b8a062a089)) - **Volume vs. Radioactivity** - High-level waste is only ~3% of volume but causes ~95% of radioactivity. - Most waste is low-level and can be landfilled after containment and decay. Transcript: Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant We should talk a little bit about other kinds of nuclear waste. We were talking about the high level waste. Again, the most problematic, obviously. That is just 3% though of total nuclear waste, but contributes 95% of the total radioactivity. More than 90% of nuclear waste is low level. And this is stuff that, you know, it might be like the protective clothes that you wore on site. It's got a little radioactive dust on it, maybe some tools, maybe some disposable materials. We have four locations in the U.S. For disposing of this low-level stuff, one in South Carolina, one in Washington State, one in Utah, and one in Texas. And this stuff is not nearly as problematic. It decays to safe levels in about, again, who knows for sure, but about 20 to 30 years. Well, I guess in that case they can test it out at this point. But that's treated almost like a landfill. It's encased in concrete and covered with backfill. ([Time 0:27:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2b21bfe3-7ea7-4e59-8b42-a1cf0b3509ae)) - **Salt Hides Defense Waste** - The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant buries transuranic defense waste deep in salt layers to seal it from groundwater. - The salt naturally deforms and isolates waste over geological time. Transcript: Josh Clark So in the meantime, it gets dropped into the waste isolation pilot plant. And for longtime listeners of the podcast or those curious enough to go through the back catalog, which is really great, we did an episode on nuclear semiotics. Remember that? Oh, yeah. Which is essentially trying to figure out how to communicate with people 10,000 years in the future that the waste isolation pilot plant is really dangerous and to steer clear of it. That was probably one of my favorite all-time episodes. Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant Yeah, for sure. And, you know, I'm glad you mentioned that real quick. ([Time 0:29:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/80d0b372-9420-4e30-9638-ea504082c16d)) - **Shutdown Plants Still Store Waste** - Decommissioned reactors still hold spent fuel in pools and dry casks; plants remain monitored long after shutdown. - We often leave waste on-site because no long-term repository yet exists. Transcript: Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant That's something that you have to do because, like I said, these things, you can't just keep tightening the bolts on these and expect it to keep running. I think, in fact, in the United States, 60 years is like the maximum limit before they say, shut this thing down. Josh Clark Yeah. And strangely, I did not realize this, but most of the contaminated stuff is low-level waste, like, you know, hazard suits and stuff like that. And even the concrete that the whole power plant is made from, I saw that only about 1% of it is radioactive. The rest can just be treated as construction waste, essentially. I saw a proposal saying, like, don't do that. Like, reuse this stuff as the concrete. Like, recycle it as the concrete that seals in the dry casks and stuff like that. So there's actually, there seems to be much more of a push to recycle all this stuff, as we'll see. But there's a whole process to decommissioning. And one of the parts of this process is making sure all those fuel assemblies, spent or otherwise, end up in the cooling pool. And then when it's their time, to dry casks. So what's interesting is a whole power plant will be taken offline, decommissioned. It's not producing power any longer. But it still has all those fuel rods in its spent fuel pool. It still has dry casks out back and there's still people watching over that stuff because we don't have anywhere to put it. We're literally leaving them in the spent fuel pools after we turn the power off on the nuclear power plants. ([Time 0:32:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/08b6b056-bdf8-43b8-afdd-8ab40cabcb61)) - **Treated Coolant Gets Dumped** - Reactor coolant water is filtered, diluted, then discharged; the process reduces but does not eliminate concern. - Josh Clark and Charles Bryant express unease about dumping treated coolant to natural waters. Transcript: Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant And I guess, you know, what's basically done with it all over the world is it's cleaned and then dumped into a waterway, an ocean or a river or a lake. And most of these plants are by a body of water for this reason. And, you know, we'll talk a little bit about how this is done, the two main processes, but I'm not like a conspiracy guy or hugely cynical, but I just don't see how that water could ever Be good enough to dump into an ocean or a lake. Josh Clark The only thing I've seen is dilution. Well, first of all, so they filter out as much of the radionuclides as possible, right? Yeah. And there's whole processes for separating those things out from the water. Yeah. Forget about it. We're just going to dump it in the ocean. And yes, it's not so bad that they're not treating it first and diluting it first, but it's still, it's like, really, that's what we can do. That's the best we can do right now. And the answer is yes. Yeah. ([Time 0:33:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/60e36a0e-b877-41e5-b1c2-e3036e396e68)) - **Spent Fuel Is An Untapped Energy Source** - Much spent fuel still contains usable fissile material; advanced reactors and recycling could reclaim huge energy value. - Current practice to bury spent fuel wastes potential resources and raises opportunity-cost concerns. Transcript: Josh Clark Stuff with Joshua and Charles. It can't be true. Stuff you should know. Okay, Chuck, so I think I said that there's kind of a new spirit of recycling that's kind of starting to sweep the nuclear industry as far as environmental aspects are concerned, right? Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant Yeah, like you can recycle this stuff. Josh Clark Yeah, because there's a couple of things. One is when a nuclear fuel rod is spent, it still has like a lot of energy left in it. It's just like you said, not enough energy to power an old school nuclear reactor. Yeah. So one solution is to develop more advanced reactors that can use those same things as fuel. They're just much more sensitive. Another thing is to take those and recycle them, like extract the usable stuff out of it, form new pellets and just start the cycle again. And you're doing a couple of cool things here. One, you're taking out the most dangerous part of the radioactive nuclear waste and leaving behind far less dangerous waste that you still have to figure out what to do with. But it's not nearly as bad as the stuff that you took out of it. And then you're also reusing power that otherwise, under the current plans of just bury it and forget it, you're burying all of that energy. There's so much energy. There's a startup called Oklo, and they estimate that the unused spent fuel that we're talking about just burying thousands of feet under the ground could power the United States, The entire United States, for the next 150 years, just with the spent nuclear fuel we have right now. And the idea is to just bury it and forget about it. And it's so stupid that it actually could be considered a lucky break that Yucca Mountain didn't work out back in 2010. And it's in limbo because it bought time for people to come up with other ideas rather than just bury the stuff that's just such a total waste. Yeah. Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant O-Close says they can recycle and reuse 94% of uranium in those spent fuel assemblies. And they're just one of 10 companies. I think they got a license from the Department of Energy to build a recycling plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. ([Time 0:37:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/60392b28-e1f2-48a3-9e0a-196d4b6bb5ec)) - **Lock Down Recycling Facilities** - Tighten security and government oversight for recycling facilities to prevent diversion of fissile material. - Coordinate startups with federal safeguards before scaling recycling operations. Transcript: Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant Shout out to the boys. Sure. And they're one of 10 companies that the Department of Energy selected as part of their reactor pilot program to build these new reactors that can be powered by recycled uranium. So that seems like a great way forward. One of the concerns here is that, you know, there is a security risk, even though like that stuff is, again, like you said, spent. If you can recycle it to use, again, even in that small quantity of unspent-ness, you could also make a dirty bomb or something for that. So it needs to be pretty, pretty locked down. Josh Clark And the same fear, except even worse, is associated with extracting plutonium from spent nuclear fuel to use that because that is the core of a nuclear weapon. And that's the kind of thing that a foreign country that doesn't have a nuclear program, but really wants one has the resources to steal from some startup to that. Is refining and extracting it in their facility in Tennessee. That's a huge – that's actually, from what I can tell, the number one obstacle to recycling nuclear waste, that security concern. Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant Yeah. I mean, they could fix that, though. Josh Clark I guess. I mean, we keep our nuclear stockpile safe, or we have for this long, so why can't we apply some of that same security to these recycling plants? I don't understand. It just seems like, yeah, that's a huge risk, but it's not something we can't figure out. Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant Well, I feel like it'd probably have to be working in concert with the government and not just saying like, all right, Oklo, you got your security team. I see those people with the black eyes on. It's all good. ([Time 0:40:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dc81c50b-53d0-457d-84bd-37a6e600a71e)) - **Change The Atom To Shorten Danger** - Transmutation uses neutron bombardment to convert long-lived isotopes into shorter-lived or stable ones, potentially producing energy. - The technique is promising but remains largely theoretical at scale. Transcript: Josh Clark Yeah, I thought this was kind of genius. So essentially, it's taking the extracted, most radioactive parts of nuclear waste and tossing it into a particle accelerator and bombarding it with neutrons. Yeah. And by doing so, you actually either, you either change them, a neutron knocks some proton or something off of one of these, off of each of these atoms and converts it into something far Less radioactive that might decay much more quickly. Or they grab onto a neutron and they transform in that way and become something that might be much more stable that isn't radioactive at all. And so you're taking the really radioactive stuff and you're degrading it really quickly in a particle accelerator. And if you do it correctly, I guess in principle, I think all of this is theoretical right now, you could actually produce energy while you're doing this. While you're getting rid of waste, you could be producing energy from the bombardment. Bombardment. ([Time 0:44:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7244edb0-3a6f-488e-a4e7-0cc6012cb2da)) - **Trap Waste Inside Glass** - Vitrification mixes waste into glass or ceramic logs, trapping radionuclides in stable matrices for long-term containment. - The waste becomes part of the glass rather than merely enclosed by it, improving resistance to leaching. Transcript: Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant Glass and ceramics can both trap those radionuclides that you were talking about. And for like a long period of time, and you know, the idea is that you store this stuff in these like glass logs or ceramic logs, basically. Glass doesn't degrade very easily, forms a very tight bond that's kind of like a force field that says nothing's getting in or getting out. It's a process called vitrification, but it's not just regular old glass. It's like, you know, sort of heavy-duty nuclear-containing glass. Josh Clark Yeah, and what's cool about it is the glass logs don't act as, like, container that you put waste in. You melt the glass-making minerals and the waste together, and it forms the glass log together. So, like, you're actually trapping the radioactive particles in glass, not inside glass, as part of glass. ([Time 0:45:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dd77cca0-9680-484d-be21-cd4bae869357)) - **Reprocessing Shrinks The Problem** - Reprocessing can recover uranium and plutonium to make MOX fuel and dramatically shrink the fraction of highly radioactive waste. - Processing spent fuel could cut problematic waste from ~90,000 tons to ~900 tons in the U.S. Transcript: Charles \\Chuck\\ Bryant We're trying to, you know, the goal there is to recover uranium and plutonium, the main materials, main fissile materials. And again, separating out the most radioactive parts of the waste product is what you're doing is you're trying just to make it all less bad, less radioactive. Josh Clark For sure. And then hopefully doing something with it, like turning it back into pellets. Like I saw to make a mixed uranium, plutonium oxide, MOX fuel, you can use eight old pellets to create one new one. So it actually is pretty efficient. And you can keep doing that over and over again until essentially you just don't have enough left to actually produce any energy. And one of the other points that I saw, Chuck, is that even if we can't figure out how to reuse the fuel that we've isolated and extracted from the spent nuclear fuel waste, just being able To do that would reduce it by so much that it would take a huge amount of our problem for figuring out what to enough left to actually produce any energy. With the waste off of the table. So like if that stuff is 1% of all nuclear waste and the United States has 90,000 tons of it, that would drop it down to just 900 tons of really problematic stuff that we had to figure out How to get rid of, not 90,000. ([Time 0:46:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/eba80fb9-306d-48e3-be75-1d2540506061))