After It Is All Over (Decommissioning) 

He's already telling them! He said in a recent video his grand-daughter watches the channel.

I agree

Which is why we're all liking every video right? ;) I'd love to see this channel suddenly blow up to 50-100k subs

Unfortunately folks would rather watch trending dances instead of educational media.

Think about it the other way. They have a field where there used to be a nuclear reactor for years on end. And now it's a green field where people walk over and picknick. No one is dying. No one is getting cancer. You can take your geiger counter there and verify everything is completely normal. There is no better way to show we can handle all nuclear stuff safely than to show the perfect oposite of what people against nuclear power tell us every now and then. It costed them a single building, but that might actually be worth it.

@Ted Longings The next time someone says Nuclear power is bad and mention Chernobyl and Fukushima, ask them for another disaster and watch them go uh, uh, uh all day long lol. Nuclear is up there in safety. Up there with renewable. A gram of Uranium would power 100 homes for an entire day. That’s the equivalent of 600 kilos of oil (1,323 pounds) or 3 tons of coal. Plus, no carbon emissions

@Ted Longings Depends on the type of nuclear... just saying.

@@snakevenom4954 You forget Three Mile Island. We all know nuclear power is not without its safety hazards. Personally, why we followed Rickover down the pressurized LWR rabbit hole vs MSRs (which Glenn Seaborg supported) is beyond me.

@@waynebreivogel1742 Fukashima, TMI, and Chernobyl were also all old technology. Modern reactors are ridiculously safe. The Fukashima reactors were at the end of their life cycles. They were actually a few years older than the Chernobyl reactors were.

They've been trying to do it to the mining industry for decades, but they operate on such slim margins, even if they do save up for clean up, the amount they can save is paltry.

@@jermainerace4156 this is when taxing and placing that money in a fund or trust would make sense. Then different energy would be closer to a level playing field, showing the actual cost to society, and more resistant to cost shifting we see currently

agreed. this has always bothered me too.

Me too

The safety standards have changed since that old containment building was built. New reactors need extra passive cooling capabilities to be able to resist for longer in case of a station blackout, you need a core catcher in case of a meltdown, they need extra safety systems, more pumps, more backups, etc... Also newer reactor design are made bigger in order to be profitable. But your smaller building won't be able to contain them. So You'll have to design a new reactor from scratch to fit inside the smaller building and fit all the extra safety equipment. The size and number of holes, pipes, doors, locks going in and out of the containment building will probably no longer match the requirements of the new reactor. Probably requiring the reactor to be tailor designed, and licensed specifically for each building. In other words : you're designing the reactor backwards (the reactor to fit the building instead of the other way around) And finally, you are going to have to certify that the concrete will still be able to work as a containment structure for the next 50-60 years (it needs to hold a steam explosion) So it's easier to just build a new reactor and a new building from scratch.

They could put a new SMR or two or four into these existing containment buildings...

@@zolikoff Concrete stops being any good after 100 years for simple structures, let alone for a reactor. It constantly dries out until it crumbles so I wouldn't be very confident in 60 year old concrete holding reactors it wasn't built with consideration for.

Actually yes; notice they didn't have to wrap the building in plastic while they were turing all that radioactive concrete into rubble and dust.

At the moment that is simply not true. Wind is definitely cheaper and solar is also more competitive on price. That is not by itself an argument against nuclear, but don't oversell the message.

dschledermann well solar and wind are very land expensive, meaning large amounts of land are required to make wind and solar commercially viable. The main downside of nuclear is the lack of safe disposal locations. The United States for example uses old reactors to store the waste, these facilities are not designed to store the waste for long periods and are a stopgap measure now for a couple decades. Once either fusion becomes viable or we are able to construct a safe storage location for the United States nuclear has a big flaw.

@@MrCoolguy425 well, not exactly. While they do take up space, renewables is not nearly as space consuming as they are commonly rumoured to be. Wind farms don't even have to be on land or land that is usable for much else. They can be at sea or in mountainous areas. In fact they work best in those areas. Solar don't need dedicated land. Rooftops are perfectly fine places for solar. To give an example the entire electricity demand of all of Europe could without problem be generated by wind farms in the north sea between Britain, Norway and Denmark.

@dschledermann Moving wind offshore or to mountains increases maintenance costs. Residential rooftop solar doesn’t factor in the cost of uninstalling and reinstalling a panel every time the roof leaks or a shingle needs replacement.

@@dschledermann Those two are the wishful thinking. Renewable/Unreliable power will never take over as primary power generation. Solar might make up a very large part of residential power, but factories need magnitudes more power than houses and need reliable, constant power. Nuclear or Hydroelectric would be the best for those.

Perhaps less than the costs for the asbest-contaminated building...

@Matt S That is especially true inside the EU, yes.

@Matt S Poland doesn't have any nuclear facilities. UK has been facing out nuclear energy for the last decades. Belgiums old reactors have had some major problems regarding tiny fractions inside the reactor vessel. Germany, in its self-destroying wisdom, regarded shutting down most of its nuclear power plants as wishful after the 1-fatality accident in Japan 5 years ago. Holland is even worse. So your EU, I'm afraid, is also in this field, on the wrong end of history.

@Matt S Indeed, apart from a handful of French nuclear reactors, there has been virtually no new reactor built since 1980 inside the whole of the European Union. Those 'liberal' left wing bureaucrats seem to think, in all their wisdom, that those so-called 'renewables' are going to do the trick. I wish they would invest in research in Gen IV nuclear (thorium) reactors; but I'm sure they won't: nuclear is the devil in their mind so they won't change a thing.

@Matt S hahaha how typical.

@Matt S I know its old topic but i want to tell you that Poland is not that pro nuclear (sadly) for sure not most of the citizens. We started building one power plant and abandoned it after few years due to the local protests in the 90'. Today we have some gov organisation that works for 5 years the ceo earns tons of PLN and they didn't even chose the location.

As far as i know, they are basically idiot proof. The only way to do any harm whatsoever is drinking the coolant

And with very low enrichment, they have a high fuel temperature coefficient. Some designs basically 'peak' and shut themselves down in seconds as the fuel heats. Provide nice pulses of neutrons for research though.

The entire reactor is made to keep the radiation inside so I doubt much radiation got through. Most likely barely more than ambient

He did, that was all the concretehe was talkig about: they cut it into pieces and buried it with a bunch of other low level waste.

Go ahead and be specific, then maybe a real discussion will ensue.

Newer reactors are larger, require more coolant, and more room. In the process of installing the new reactor you’ll make the building fall on top of the new reactor. But I do think they should just build a new reactor straight away

It was done due to emotions. Same type of thinking that got California's Berkeley to ban natural gas including restaurants. The politicians themselves don't have to pay to retrofit restaurants. I would love to have this professor debate the political candidates in a format that gives everyone time to really talk in substantial amounts instead of 2 minute sound bites. China is planning out decades while the US leaders only care about the next election cycle. China is building nuclear reactors to phase out coal which the USA should have done generations ago. The only reason why we're talking about saving the coal jobs is because of terrible leadership that didn't replace coal with Nuclear. The Democrats don't care about the locals when they propose replacing mining with contractor work(green jobs). What happens when all of the homes of a state that has a declining population have solar panels, what will the workers do then? We should be talking about turning coal country into the Silicon Valley of nuclear energy & research. That's a real legitimate pitch instead of the idea of making coal workers solar panel instillation contractors. Consider how that would transform the region. We could see growth instead of a decline.

Yeah, free speech is so "salty." Can't have that.

Because it's not actually raidoactive enough to need it. It's just so heavily regulated because nuclear power scares people.

​@@ottopike6000 You're spreading misinformation. The reason why people didn't need to wear protection is because they were only exposed to the low level radioactive reactor parts for a very short amount of time during the disposal. It's so heavily regulated because a low level radioactive dosis for a long amount of time is a high health risk and highly increases cancer. I firmly invite you to put a low level radioactive sample of a beta or gamma emitter near your bed for some years and test for yourself whether heavy regulation of low level radioactive waste disposal is overrated or not.

@@olska9498 I could be wrong, but my understanding is that we're talking about 10× background radiation here. There's no evidence of that causing an increased risk of cancer.

It's because their idea is to wait until the radionuclides decay, so the decommissioning is not insanely expensive. It's insanely expensive because every single radioactive atom has to be accounted for if it can be accounted for. Never mind that ordinary buildings made of concrete are also radioactive and they're just open air demolished most of the time. It's a nuclear power plant and god damn us if we won't spend billions of dollars to make sure not a single atom of cesium makes it out!

zolikoff Thanks for the reply 👍

@@zolikoff Ah yes, regulation. How terrible to regulate something potentially dangerous. Id rather be over cautious than have an accident. Regulations arent anti nuclear, they are there to prevent accidents and malicious actors.

@@TheJorge100 Everytime when people ask why the staff of the power plant in Chernobyl made so many mistakes and ignored so many safety procedures, I remember people like "zolikoff" exist who just don't understand the reason behind regulations, safety procedures, safe reactor designs, safe decommission etc. I mean, he seriously compared the natural-occurring radioactivity of building material with the radioactivity of contaminated reactor material. So sad.

They're currently decommissioning Chernobyl unit 4. They recently finished the "New Safe Confinement", a larger structure which was built next to the reactor and slid into place over it. It completely encloses the old improvised "Sarcophagus" built shortly after the accident, which had seriously deteriorated at that point. It was difficult for Ukraine to pay for cleanup, and the current effort is an international one, since a failure of the Sarcophagus would be bad for everyone in Europe. With new confinement structure in place, they can begin to disassemble the sarcophagus and then start cleaning up all the high level waste still inside. The new structure was built with automated equipment for this purpose.

@@TonboIV Oh, they're going to decomission the unit that blew up. No of course not. That was my point.

@@jjohnson4153 I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Decommissioning of Unit 4 (the one that blew up) is in progress now.

Asbestos would be a big problem overtime. Walls would require maintenance which would like costs much more than dismantling and building something new.

This, but don't wait 100 years. If it's inside containment you can just replace the reactor immediately.

I don't think that safety regulation in 100 years will enable to reuse a building that was made with safety regulations that are 40 years old today.

It is not only the radiation but the building themselves aged and lost strength and safety. Wear and tear.

Concrete wears out, environmental factors wear it down, safety standards are updated (seriously, you wouldn't want to even TRY to build a modern reactor in a shell from the 1970s), and probably most importantly, we're (ideally) not building the same type of reactor we're pulling out.

The fuel degrades through a slow aging process, it is still very very dangerous, you can't reverse radioactive decay.

they were embarrassed they had a nuclear reactor.

@@jmd1743 only the dumbest left-wingers can be 'embarrassed' they teach their kids technology.

@@amostake They think that EVs made sense in the era of Nicad and NIMH batteries. Throwing money at a problem wouldn't make lithium come sooner because then powertools wouldn't have used that antiquated battery technology. "Learn to code" is the modern day "let them it cake" but the the cake statement is that the woman herself didn't say it, and it was an author who had no affiliation with the french family claimed she said it when she was only 10 years of age. Could have solved the coal issue long ago by transitioning to nuclear generations ago. Westinghouse should donate one of their modular micro reactors to send to Mars. Reactors can fit in a cargo container. It would fix that bad image nuclear has going for it. Since it's modular if they need more power they just send another reactor on the flight out. Since it's mars it wouldn't matter if they entomb it 20 or 30 years later a bit away from the base. Here's the video. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Sh6BKKFxN_g.html

He has a video on "high level waste", but to make it bite-sized for you no the fuel isn't "just put on a regular dump truck". the absolute state of youtube comments smh

Funny how you have done the same thing.

So? A few tons of high level waste get stored in a dry cask. What's the problem exactly?

@@Cutest-Bunny998 The problem is this guy forgot to tell HOW to deal with high level waste. And HOW to destroy it...

He has a whole other video about high level waste... what are you talking about?

@@ihabhatim5825 But said NOTHING about destroying the waste...

@@WadcaWymiaru you can't destroy high level waste. You can only transform it into low level waste and wait for it to turn into stable isotopes.