D (55:17)
So first I have to talk about those 55 gallon drums highly radioactive nuclear waste does not sit in those. Highly radioactive nuclear waste sits in containers so thick, so strong, so sturdy that specialized ultra strong machines are required to move them. And I have personally gone and hugged, put my arms around and put my body next to these giant nuclear waste containers while holding a high end dosimeter on my, on my core, over my heart, and have gotten no dose like not even a registerable amount of radiation. So the 55 gallon drums are a favorite of stock photos and of immoral publishers at newspapers because they they're bright yellow and they can scare. But in reality those don't exist, or where they do, they are used to contain radioactive waste so harmless that it is an actual moral and engineering question whether they should be counted officially as radioactive waste at all. Certainly they're often less radioactive than chemical wastes that are not considered radioactive in other industries like coal tailings or other mine tailings. So the drums we we've dispensed with in terms of the, this being in the perception category rather than the real category, I think itself is quite perceptive of you, Eric, because the nuclear waste itself, when handled properly, which it has been almost continuously in the history of civilian nuclear energy, has not caused any deaths or injuries ever. With one of the only possible edge cases being the safety culture issue at the nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Japan where a poorly trained worker undergoing a bad process hurt himself and died from radiation exposure. So unprocessed nuclear waste has not harmed anyone, nor has there really been allegations of such, real or not. That's because there's almost no access to this waste by civilians. And so people who are against it often don't even know what it looks like or how to describe it, or how to even start explaining to people their physical fears. It's a phantom fear for this reason that if you ask somebody who doesn't like nuclear waste to describe for you what nuclear waste looks like and what form it takes, 99 times out of 100 they will struggle severely, need to consult sources, and suddenly be confronted for the first time ever that nuclear waste is not in a 55 gallon yellow barrel with a nuclear symbol on it. Let's talk about two approaches to waste handling that I've seen in my, in my time so far. One, each nuclear plant in the US has some area on site with large concrete drums that are about, oh, I'd say they're about 12 to 16ft tall. And inside of each of these is a thick steel canister, and inside of that are several spent fuel Bundles that have spent, I'd say four to five years in a reactor, followed by four to seven years in a spent fuel pool. Just getting cooler and cooler and cooler. Slightly heating up that water inside the nuclear plant in the pool, but just very easy to cool. You could get a bucket and keep, keep water covering those in the event of a, of an emergency loss of power. So it's a very low energy crisis if you lose all power and have to refill the spent fuel pool. Now that was one of the greatest fears in the aftermath of the 311 events over at Fukushima Daiichi. There was panic around the world that these spent fuel pools that needed to be replenished would boil off and the nuclear waste would spontaneously heat up and catch fire and it would pollute everything down to Tokyo and would cause millions of deaths for mass evacuation. That was bullshit. It was always bullshit. And this gets us to the 1 million years of radiation. Eric, if something is radioactive for a million years, it's not very radioactive. Something you have to be scared of are things with a half life of minutes, days, hours, weeks, or even a few years that can be very dangerous. That means you have something breaking down extremely quickly and therefore putting out radiation. If somebody claims to be scared of millionaire radiation, it means you're dealing with somebody who does not have a concept of what radiation means, of what radioactive decay means. And they are likely to be walking around granite buildings with radiation as high as about, you know, the last six or seven hundred thousand years of that radioactive decay that they claim to be afraid of. And that they're encountering that by walking around, say, high altitude environments, taking a flight, walking next to granite buildings. And yet they claim that that same level of radiation that they would experience walking next to granite would be their fear for hundreds of thousands of years. And that it needs special warning that demonstrates you're talking to somebody who you do not share a physical understanding with yet. And either you need to gain a spiritual understanding that makes them feel better, or you need to slowly explain the physics. Either way, you're not dealing with somebody who's scared of nuclear waste, the reality, but instead nuclear waste, the perception. So what are we going to do about it? For me, there's one important way forward. Call it the Dutch solution or going Dutch with waste. Perhaps if we're going to, we're going to say it with a smile. So Netherlands has one reactor. It's not too big, it would be called an SMR Small Modular Reactor if it were made today. But it is a German designed reactor, a Siemens, and I visited it. I've gone inside containment during operation. It's a little gym. It's absolutely fantastic. And they run a great facility, the Dutch. They even have really cool work clothes. They're bright orange and they fit quite well as opposed to many of the shift clothes that they have in American plants that are baggy and just a terrible look. So the Dutch look good while making nuclear energy out of a beautiful reactor. What do they do with the waste? After a few years in the reactor and a few years in the spent fuel pool, they send the waste packaged up in an impenetrably strong container over to France where in a large facility, France recycles the waste. What does that mean? They open the travel container, they pull out the waste, they chop it up to get the fuel inside, the, the fuel rods out, they dissolve it in acid. They then use a chemical process to separate out the uranium and the plutonium and the fission products. What are fission products? Those are the smaller particles, particles much smaller than uranium and plutonium that come from breaking apart uranium as the reactor operates. So these fission particles tend to be much more radioactive than the uranium plutonium that they're separated from. These highly radioactive fission products are then put in a glass block in a glass cylinder that's packaged up and that's returned to the Dutch. So fission products are not going to be radioactive for a million years. They're going to be highly radioactive for a few hundred years. The fission products are then put in these tall columns in a very large, strong concrete building that is then painted beautifully and opened up to school kids so they can go on science tours. That's right. The Dutch have made a museum touring experience out of their nuclear waste storage. They have put a fantastic museum up front where they have examples of radioactive consumer products that used to be made before the nuclear era dawned. Radioactive medicines, radioactive plates, radioactive scientific instruments. Then my favorite part of the museum tour, they have a cloud chamber where they show you the fabric of the universe in front of your very eyes. You see cosmic rays shooting through. In a dark room, you're looking into this glass cube where you can see, because of the illumination in the cube making any bubbles that happen to come in that cube show up. Cosmic rays shooting through cause condensation. They cause a little bit of bubble in the container and makes little droplets. And you can see cosmic rays going through your body, through the cube and into your friend. You can see much fatter. Globs of bubbles come from larger, higher energy particles breaking apart from Say if you put a thorium lantern mantle in, you can see the radiation popping off. So they're able to instruct in alpha, beta and gamma radiation, the three main types that you're dealing with when you're protecting against nuclear waste. And then after showing children in front of their own eyes the actual radiation popping off in the universe and off of consumer products, then they take everybody and tour you through the facility itself, showing you the protection against the radiation that they showed you in front of your face in the museum. It's a stunning display. Oh, and they have, they have radiation counters. For those who want them, you can wear them. Those who don't care, you don't have to wear them. And on this tour you see how they handle low level, medium level, and finally, most fascinatingly, the high level nuclear waste. In this high level nuclear waste facility, there's a three foot thick door that slowly rolls open. Then you climb over some steps and you can see down this long hall all of these circles in the ground. These circles in the ground are the lids above the columns of nuclear waste. If you put your hand on the red painted floor around them, you feel heat rising up from the floor, just from the hot air, circling through naturally into the building and out the out the stacks above that cool this nuclear waste. So the Dutch technique does not stop there. The Dutch approach does not. Just doesn't stop there. The Dutch approach is a social, ongoing process where every 20 years or so they're going to hold key meetings to see what the public thinks and what scientific experts think about the next step. What's the next step? Oh, well, maybe they'll bury it in the ground if people want to. It'd be expensive. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. Depends on what people want. But they show every day the active protection of health and safety within. An entertaining, fascinating pro nuclear energy tour.
