Was literally today listening to Decouple and thinking “I may be now convinced on nuclear, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to get anyone to listen to half a dozen 1hr podcast episodes and I’m sure not about to convey all the correct details in a compelling way verbally. Someone should make a RU-vid channel about it” and here we are. Very well done.
I worked on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in the early 1980's while I was at Los Alamos National Laboratories. The problem of safely storing high level nuclear waste was solved by then. Yucca Mountain has the perfect combination of geography and geology. We know exactly what to do with the high level waste from the USA. Excellent video! This is an emotional problem, not a technical problem.
Let me get this straight. Before it's tossed down a glorified mountain hole where water won't get at it for millions of years, it's sitting around - perfectly safe - in concrete storage boxes with people walking about daily? Now, I knew that waste management of nuclear fuel was over engineered to eliminate risk ... but sheesh.
I’m not convinced, it’s too cavalier about radioactive waste that last very long time and downplayed the dangers. Accidents are caused by complacency and each time some nuclear accident happened, they would say that would never happen again because of da, da and da. There will always be hidden dangers that are unthought of. There are horrible accidents that many people don’t know about. I read of some radiation leaks where Japanese workers were exposed to the nuclear fuels. One by one they died, with the last dying a horrible slow and painful death. That was before Fukushima accidents, and I don’t think it’s the only one apart from the disasters we know well.
@@madsam0320 Feelings. Like a fear of spiders. ‘There are people that died horribly from spider bites”, etc. There is no ‘convincing’ anyone out of that fear.
I don't often click on YT ads, but this one drew me in. I used to be quite fearful of nuclear energy until I learnt more about it, and was extremely curious as to what had to be said regarding nuclear waste. I'm only a few minutes in, but this is EXTREMELY well done and put together. I'm honestly surprised that your channel isn't bigger. Definitely excited to see your other content and also what you put out in future 🙏 anyway, I hope that you have a great weekend!
Oh man... You had me laughing multiple times there. The match bit 😂. Masterclass in communicating on spent fuel aka "waste". This will be a huge resource for us advocates trying to talk to journalists and policymakers about this. Really appreciate all the work that went into this. Stay rad ✊
Great video, we have not yet built a, Deep level repository in the UK. We're still arguing about where it's going to go. At the moment, all the waste is stored under water & above ground. But it's comforting to know that the waste that does exist is, far less harmful than the gigatonnes of waste from Fossil Fuel power generation...
Jessie's videos just getting better and better! Absolutely superb work! 🙌 Just a single nitpick if I'm allowed to (nothing's perfect even though you got quite close!): at 23:24 you mention Teller is standing in front of used nuclear fuel, but those green vessels almost surely contain enrichment tails, i.e. the depleted uranium (DU) "waste" that isn't irradiated and typically just sits there as UF6. Although people have got nervous lately about its very low radioactivity (plus wanting to reuse the fluorine, which has value), thus conversion of DU stockpiles back to U3O8 is underway in the US. Naturally, as Teller goes about saying, those DU stockpiles are potential fuel for future breeders, that doesn't need to be mined nor refined. Staying tuned for the next one! And once again, kudos.
Glad you caught that! As an aside I think those plants are the least likely place you're gonna find someone falling. Very strict rules on how to use everything from ladders to stairs.
Well, they don't call it hazardous nuclear waste for nothing you know. And if you were to try climbing on top of a waste vessel without a ladder, it would be even more hazardous.
If you don't mind, I now want to steal that and write a short story with something like that as the premise. I've also come to the conclusion that the best way to end the tragic tale is to have the heroes successfully manage to breach a repository and get to the bottom of it... only to find that the spent fuel has all been transmuted to lead. At that point, the main character falls to his knees, hurling expletives in a callback to Planet of the Apes (yeah, the timeliness would be massively exacerbated, but it makes for a good yarn)
Probably one of the smallest channels I'm subbed to but one of my favorites - keep being handsome and providing easy to digest information to educate the next generations, brother
Amazing Jess! Your videos have always been excellent but this is at a higher level! Thank you for the research and thoughtful ways to share them. It’s fun. Impactful and totally important. Bravo
My main criticism for this very well made video is that it accepts the LNT-based error that radiation is always dangerous. It isnt as maybe my video may convince you: No More Radiophobia! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-JpcUCo0ebNA.html .
Thanks Richard! Yes probably best to have a dosimeter with you to be sure before cuddling a fuel bundle. But the numbers were checked over by a professional health physicist and we went with the more conservative answers.
High level waste - irradiated used fuel rods is actually a viable fuel for fast spectrum molten salt reactors. The oxide fuel is chemically processed into a fuel salt. All the actinides are present so there’s no proliferation issue. It then delivers at least 20x as much power as the old PWR was able to take. The result is a waste with a 1/2 life of 30 years vs 30,000 years for the bare fuel rods.
I got this video from an ad recommending this video on a Kyle Hill video, his latest one Thank you random ad, thank you for bringing me here for more nuclear content
I love this video! Genius! Now if I can just get my wife that is terrified of nuclear waste to watch this amazing video and buy me a Decouple T-shirt from the UK shipped to Texas.
Your wife is wise, it’s nasty stuff.. read about the horrible death of a man exposed to massive radiation. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-2TxLrfdMKWY.html
Great video Jesse. I could only spot one error in the whole thing: At the 23:27 point, you say that Edward Teller is "standing in front of some used nuclear fuel." That's not the case. Those cylinders are typically used to store DU - depleted uranium - from enrichment plants. It's in the form of hexafluoride or "DUF". If that DUF were converted back to metal (or oxide) it could be used in breeder reactors, as you state correctly elsewhere. TerraPower's MCFR is intended to do exactly that. This avoids having to deal with used nuclear fuel - reprocessing it - which is far more complicated and costly. Also, there is far more DU available in storage, that there is used nuclear fuel.
Interesting. I don't have it in front of me right now but I'm 82% sure in the original film (entitled Endless Energy) Teller says they are half full of U-238. But its quite possible I'm remembering it wrong. Or that that original film got it wrong. Thanks for pointing it out!
@@decouplemedia DU is basically U238. The enrichment process leaves these "tailings", which are like natural uranium, but with the U235 fraction reduced from 0.71% to about 0.2%. I just realized that this impacts on your thesis, that used fuel can be re-used. It can. But DU is easier & cheaper to deal with, as well as being more plentiful. Sorry about that.
@@jarofranta153 Actually Jessie's thesis still holds. The valuable bit in spent fuel isn't the fertile, which is plentiful and centuries' worth of it literally sit ready to use as enrichment tailing stockpiles, but the fissile. That tiny 1% of spent fuel mass that is Pu that today is perceived as a terrible stewardship burden, could prove handy (and cheaper than substitutes) for our descendants. On the one hand, beeders indeed make their own fissile and some while running purely on fertile feeds such as U-238 or Th-232. On the other hand, they still need an initial stock of fissile material to start up, i.e. the fissile works almost like a catalyst whose inventory you have to somehow obtain. For a fast breeder that can be 5-10 tons fissile/GWe; if we imagine our descendants getting it all as enriched uranium (i.e., HALEU) that'd mean mining up to 2,000 tons of U/GWe. If by then we have depleted all easily accesible cheap U ores by burning the U-235 in them (today's reserves are conservatively around 4-7 MtU) and then proceeded to bury the spent fuel making it inaccessible, we'll have left our descendants with no other choice but to get it from dilute ores on land or seawater, or to build the fleet very slowly over decades or centuries by accumulating bred fissile. None of this is by any means a deal breaker, and it's mostly a remote concern rather than a practical proximate one. Still, we get daily preaches about the need to move to renewable sources -not just clean, as if fossil fuels were at risk of imminent depletion, or if that was the reason we should stop burning them. So why can't we do the same here? In that quasi-philosophical context, I do buy Jessie's argument. Why do we want to make things harder for future generations? If sustainability means anything, it is "the ability to satisfy current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to do so". Aren't we by putting our spent fuel in the subsurface forever, just to alleviate our own public anxieties on radioactivity with the hope of breaking political deadlock, doing something which is unsustainable by definition? Shouldn't we grow up and solve political problems via politics? Sorry for the long rant!
I believe the largest push back against nuclear is coming from the nat gas industry through many different organizations. They have the most to lose from nuclear and also the most to gain from more and more wind and solar. Affordable large scale backup for wind/solar from batteries is decades away (if ever) and until then nat gas is the only thing that can affordably fill in for the 2/3 of the time when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. So more renewables ensures more nat gas usage, while more nuclear would mean less, a lot less.
Simply the best video on the nuclear waste conundrum i've ever seen, nuclear advocates & nuclear detractors alike need to see this & share, incredibly informative!
Excellent video ......these are the videos that should go viral. I used to wonder and was worried about nuclear waste etc etc. But for now my worries are gone
This is an absolute masterclass on spend nuclear fuel, or as we should call it: THE WORLDS BEST WASTE. It is basically just a heavy metal, easy to store and handle, has killed 0 people in 60+ years and it can be recycled in the next generation of reactors. Amazing job!! Extremely educational and fun.
@@decouplemedia Keep up the great work we need more concise informed content like this. Love the movie watching example, so on point for the real world.
As a US resident, I learned about the CANDU reactors when I was working for a software company that had Canadian customers in the power industry. When I found out about how the CANDU reactors were designed and operated, I gained a lot of respect for the Canadian nuclear effort. In the US, we could learn a lot from studying that history.
Bananas have antimatter shooting out of them!!! Yes, I know it's a tiny amount, and more importantly an utterly harmless amount, but it's fun to phrase it that way for drama.
@@davidfetter I don’t know about antimatter. Haven’t heard that before. However the composition of bananas is high in certain naturally occurring isotopes so they’re slightly higher than background radiation. Normally I’ve only thought of them from the being exposed externally. The point made about eating radioactive waste made me think about eating naturally radioactive bananas. Still not concerned about the health risks. The benefits of eating bananas
Thanks the Nukleria e.V. Association in Germany, they shared this Video on Linkedin and I was very impressed by this quality, so I subscribing now, hoping for other videos in this quality. Really happy about the points and comparing the radioactive waste, with other waste. The Arsenic mine is really shocking, due climate change will increase temperature and let to melding the ice, so its only a matter of time, of a real environmental disaster there.
It’s a mistake to suggest climate change is responsible for every harm. The things it will do are bad enough. There’s no glacier “ice” cap out there to melt by that mine. The threat to flooding comes from either a fast spring melt of annual snow fall, as was said, or an extreme rain event.
Fantastic video! One thing that I can't get out of my head when looking at the dry casks. They look almost exactly like a bucket that you can buy road salt in. Just many times bigger. It looks like it's just storing a LOT of road salt. Also, the only thing I wish you added was the Moltex reactor. But otherwise a fantastic video!
Yes Moltex is a very interesting tech. For this 'Waste 101' video wanted to stick to just what has been proven in the field. Really hoping to see Moltex succeed though. A great example of what could happen if we went back to putting our best minds on nuclear energy (instead of coming up with better ways to get the caramel in the caramilk bar)
@@decouplemedia hey now! Chocolate is serious business! I will not sit here while you besmirch the caramilk bar! 😁 In seriousess though, I'm really curious. I'm not 100% sure but I think the spent fuel from the BRWX-300 could be used in a CANDU. Meaning we might see the same fuel used three times. BWRX-300 > CANDU > Moltex waste burner. That would be impressive.
Slow spectrum reactors burning uranium oxide fuel (eg PWR) can only remove about 4% of the fissile energy. 96% is untouched and that’s exactly why it’s so incredibly radioactive. Moltex and Elysium are going through the regulatory hoops to use waste fuel rods as commercial fuel. Just 4% of the fissile energy has been extracted. 25x as much is fitting there waiting to be used. No new mining, a high operating temperature (highly efficient) and a radioactive waste life 1/1000 of the original downgrade fuel.
Great video Jesse. Regarding the remaining habitable time left for planet Earth, a major challenge occurs in about a billion years when the gradually brightening Sun evaporates the oceans. This is generally held to be a Bad Thing, but of course is much less dramatic than the much later engulfing scene.
Hehe. Good catch Jon! When I make these videos I have to be very disciplined about not spending hours researching/confirming facts that are tangential to the central argument of the piece, in particular my snarky humour bits. But as I was watching the dramatizations I said to myself "things are clearly gonna get hairy long before the expanding sun gets anywhere near Earth, I'm gonna look into the exact timeline of consquences" but then slapped my hand and got back to the nuclear waste stuff. hehe.
Thanks for the video! I hope you'll do one that makes a more direct case for breeders and burners, and maybe yet another on just how much of a pain in the rump it is to get from a hunk of plutonium to even the crudest, least weaponizable nuclear explosive. Oh, and I'd hoped you'd choose a Slim Pickens clip from Dr. Strangelove. The title was definitely a Checkov's gun for a reference to that movie. Kudos!
Brilliant video, as it is engaging! I was waiting for the part about recycling SNF, and having grown up in the 60's, being taught to hate Teller, father of the H-bomb, here, I actually love him for his Strangeloveian plugging nuclear power to replace fossil fuels to save the planet (in 1959!). The part about breeder reactors might well have come before all the nevertheless great build-up on how safely the stuff is stored, but the one caveat about breeding new fuel that could be dismissed might simply be that all that bi-product generated bomb-grade Pu could be denatured, or rendered unusable - at least as far as some scientific reports I've come across. No? If so, a total, over the top win-win, and pretty much 'burying' the 'waste problem' for, like, ever!
Good points. I guess the challenge with everything that has to do with proliferation and bomb development is a question of trust and/or monitoring. In other words, that even if the int'l or national protocol was to denature the bomb-grade Pu, an actor with no intention to abide by that could use a breeder reactor to stock Pu more efficiently than they could with a conventional reactor. And in that sense I do think it is important to discuss that potential downside to a world of breeder reactors. Though I do wish I had the time in this piece to go down a bit of a tangent into exactly how far you still are from a functional bomb even if you have a pile of plutonium (that you managed to sneak past the IAEA fairly impressive monitoring regime). But thanks for bringing this up because for me personally (Jesse, not speaking for Decouple as a whole) the most important challenge facing the future expansion of nuclear energy to replace most of the work currently being done by fossil fuels is the threat of nuclear weapons, even if it is a minute one, risk calculation is probability x potential consequences, and in this case the potential consequences is almost incalculably large. So it always merits the most thorough of thinking and discussion.
And as far as Teller goes, I don't think I could ever trust or respect a man who literally had a picture of the first successful h-bomb test sitting over his desk. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EdwardTeller1958_fewer_smudges.jpg#/media/File:EdwardTeller1958_fewer_smudges.jpg Not to mention the lies and shenanigans he pulled to remove Oppenheimer from his way. But like you I thought it was interesting the parallel between him and Strangelove. The idea that this despicable human was a pioneer to the thinking I'm currently exploring (that nuclear energy may be the greatest solution for humanity to have both material dignity AND avoid ecological disaster) is a great example of why my takeaway with Teller is that its important to have Dr. Strangelove in the room to share his research and analysis, but NEVER let him have any real power.
We might well be grateful that Teller wasn’t working for the Third Reich :-O Not to allow him too much benefit of the doubt, he may have been so deeply and abstractly into the physics of nuclear energy that his quest was to actualize a god-like Big Bang as a successful experiment…the photo over his desk being his greatest trophy. I don’t know enough about Teller or his morals, but besting the Red Scare and the Cold War arms race was a central goal of his Dept. of Defense employer. And there was that bunch of scientists who cooked up the concept of a Neutron Bomb to make Teller’s H. look minuscule by comparison. And who could forget the Mother of All Weapons, the Doomsday Machine, which, when implanted within the Earth’s core would rend the planet apart? Take that, Soviet scum!
Haha. Yeah the idea of the scientist just calmly developing planet-destroying weapons motivated solely by the desire to solve a physics problem reminds me of Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' thesis in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. In the Teller case it helps explain why good institutions need people with both humanistic values as well as the freedom/channels to blow the whistle when those values are being threatened.
The USA's otherwise high tech ability with advanced nuclear is severely hogtied, due to the insanely overly-protective Nuclear Regulatory Commission's obsession with zero-radiation. Then it's up to other countries to lead the way to a carbon-free future with nuclear power....O, Canada?
The Sciencing Re-search process is a matter of applying the observational principles to study and accumulate the dominant harmonic/anharmonic effective probabilistic information In-form-ation substantiation, systematically, and categorically order it as accurately as possible in the perspectives of Eternity-now landscapes. First comes precisely evaluated evidence and then the Actuality of degrees of accuracy. A very common characteristic of modern reporting will place emphasis on certain aspects in order to bias the perception in a way that, in the natural context of mono-dualistic continuous connection identification of probabilistic cause-effect situations, only a careful critique/analysis can fill out the appropriate spectrum. This is a great video, it will get better with a little aging.
If you're ever in the Netherlands to visit COVRA I'd love to be there with you. On their website they state that you can book a tour for groups larger than 10 people.
Excellent informative presentation... you exhibit great bravery sharing your knowledge in these days of scientific ignorance... good luck and please populate the future!
At school in the 1980s we were gas lighted by "green peace" about the horrors of nuclear waste. As someone interested in physics at the time - i wondered why if nuclear waste has so much energy still left in it are we throwing it away?
Engineer: "But what if we hit the box with a thermonuclear blast?" Other Engineer: "Won't that defeat the purpose a bit?" Engineer: "We should try it just to be sure"
@@decouplemedia So, I found out that I could either directly edit subtitles in youtube (that needs your permission) or it would be a practical start to get your .srt file as a start. (All the time marks would be there already and I could easily translate them). I would be glad to help.
@ 2:30 I don't get it, how comes a Uranium fuel Pellet is not Radioactive from the beginning but only gets radioaktiv during the time spent in the reactor?
Not an expert, but once it goes inside a nuclear reactor it gets exposed to neutrons which triggers nuclear fission. ie, it makes an uranium split into two atoms. these fission products may be very radioactive.
What Ara said is bang on. I would just add that the fuel pellets pre-fission are radioactive, more radioactive than a banana or a table, but not radioactive enough to be dangerous. But as Ara says some of the products created by fission (the splitting of the uranium atom) are very radioactive (and thus shortlived) and you definitely want 10 feet of water or so between you and them to absorb their gamma rays.
Absolutely brilliant fantastic word. Although I will have to edit out the F bombs in the S bombs. Those are two of the seven words that you can never say on American radio governed by the FCC.
@@decouplemedia Hell no! Down here in New Zealand (& Australia) those words are part of 'frank and honest' journalistic reporting. In some street conversations, they're used as 'spoken fillers'. 🤣 There's only 2, still verboten words one can't say on Public Broadcast here in NZ; the 'N' word and the 'C' word. If certain nutbar ideologues had their way, they'd ban saying 'Nuclear'... "The other verboten N-word, just sayin'... "- Neil DeGrasse Tyson no less
How about taking some of that waste heat from spent fuel and use for district heating. ( You can bring a container to my house anytime, ( free energy))
The share button? hehe. It's a good question and obviously from our numbers you can tell that we haven't found the answer yet. Any help is very very appreciated.
@@decouplemedia the major media and political narratives are still unchanged from fear mongering and lies. Maybe if we get green organizations to switch their position they can pressure them into change?
@@decouplemedia unfortunately this country's political system and protest organizations run on money and we don't have enough to get meaningful messages through
Share this with someone like the video and ask them to do the same information like this should be trending above all the other garbage on all platforms
Really we should build a reprocessing plant deep underground. That way, you can recycle it, dispose of the waste and simplify the decommissioning (just grout the facility and leave it in place, it's 500 meters below ground next to all of the nuclear waste anyways).
Instead of burying it and wasting the waste, 93% of the energy is still in it, thus putting it into a molten salt reactor the fuel will power humans electricity for many many years longer than it did in a pressurized water reactor which after 25 years only used 6 %.
Aren't we wasting precious resources into putting so much overprotection around nuclear spent fuel? Wouldn't part of that money be better spent protecting other toxic waste deposits?
This is where I think the conversation should be happening. Even more than the money are all the great minds that are working on the problem that could be deployed elsewhere.
Major indexes booked their worst yearly performance since 2008 thanks to drivers like the recession, war, hiked interest rate and inflation which so far doesn't seem to be easing off, so l'm left wondering what 2023 has in store for us investors, l've been sitting on over $745K equity from a home sale and I'm not sure where to go from here, is it a good time to buy or do I wait?
This is still a window-shopping market . But there are a lot of intriguing stocks to watch from a variety of sectors. You don't have to act on every forecast, hence i will suggest you get yourself a financial-advsor that can provide you with entry and exit points on the shares/ETF you focus on
When it comes to investing in stocks, one of the biggest mistakes investors can make is throw in the towel right when we hit a bear market bottom and the indexes find support and start to surge. I've been in touch with a coach for awhile now mostly cause I lack the depth knowledge and mental fortitude to deal with these recurring market conditions, I nettd over $220K during this dip, that made it clear there's more to the market that we avg joes don't know
My advisor "Jackson Sten Marsh " is highly qualified and experienced in the financial market. he has extensive knowledge of portfolio diversity and is considered an expert in the field. I recommend researching him credentials further. He has many years of experience and is a valuable resource for anyone looking to navigate the financial market.
Great catch! I wasn't aware that Zwilag offered tours. Very cool. (But COVRA are still the champs for including all that art hehe...then again Zwilag has a lot more waste to store)
What about it as in why didn't I mention it? There's so very many things I didn't have time to get to in this piece. My only focus was "what is the high-level waste, how do we manage it in 2023, and what we might do with it in the future. Ocean dumping ended in the early 90s and no country that we know of ever dumped the high-level used fuel in the ocean. So touching on that subject was outside the purview of this video both in terms of the materials in question and the timeline. But it definitely is an interesting topic to consider in a future video.
Well. I gotta say that if in 29 mins that's the only problem you found then we're doin pretty well. I hadn't taken elevators into account as I was only considering horizontal (not sure that's the right word) transportation. But now you've got me wondering if maybe bungee cords are the safest form of transportation.
Thanks, awesome educational video. Thanks for the time you put in I already knew a lot about nuclear chemistry, radio- chemistry, whatever you want to call it, chemistry was my life for a while, so I am very famliar with the interplay of exponents, nuclear decay and time...but I had never done extrapolation of the decay series such that there were time periods in could fathom in which spent nuclear fuel would again be "safe" to share space with. Thanks for good, practical examples and some excellent counter-arguments to people who don't or won't give nuclear power a chance. People do not realize that nuclear power, as a field, as a developing technology was given the worst possible introduction to humanity as is possible and the worst chance at being successful in a peaceful application as a technology ever has or ever will. As its genesis, nuclear chemistry(which didn't really begin and wasn't understood until early in the last century) as a field in its whole, was hijacked and everything in the field was bent towards doing something big with it right away. The most obvious goals that seemed both certain and lucrative were in the prospect of it as an energy source and in particular, as a fuel for a bomb. What we know today as nuclear energy would be a very different field, and I believe one that conjures up very different images in a person's mind when they hear the word "nuclear." Nuclear science is just now getting the attention and funding, in the right specialty fields, that it should have experienced around 100 years ago. Even with all these very strong, negative characteristics of nuclear energy holding it back, it is so promising as a solution to many of mankind's biggest problems, that it has managed to stay very lively in discussions about the future and energy. As well it should. I love the U.S. military so this isn't an attack on them; if we'd spent as much money developing nuclear technologies in to a viable energy source as we did n to an apocalyptic weapon, we wouldn't be having this discussion. You don't have to have a Ph.d in nuclear science to be able to see that there is still a great deal of miracle level discoveries to be made and answers to our most serious problems to be gleaned from nuclear chemistry.
Very good points Chris. I also envision a potential future where our kids look back at the 20th century and think "you guys were sooo close to major breakthrough 'x' that truly unlocks the most efficient, ecologically responsible and safest way to deploy E=MC2, if only you hadn't distracted yourself with those stupid weapons and the politics they created."
Just barely a mention of utilizing spent fuel in gen. IV reactors. This is the most important point by far, yet barely glossed over. Even Canada's own Moltex Energy is developing a reactor specifically designed to utilize high-level CANDU waste. Why gloss over the most important aspect of nuclear waste?
For this 'Waste 101' video I wanted to stick to tech that has been proven in the field, and even still struggled mightily to keep the video under 30 minutes. Please do not interpret this as "glossing over" Gen 4 reactors and what they promise to do. I very much hope to see Moltex and others succeed. They are the iceberg tip of what could happen if we went back to putting our best minds on nuclear energy, instead of coming up with better ways to get the caramel in the caramilk bar.
@@decouplemedia people worry about having to store this waste for hundreds of thousands of years. The ultimate solution for this waste will be here in tens of years. This is not fusion we're talking about, this is very well understood physics it will happen. This high-level waste is worth a fortune and New power generation that doesn't require any mining. This seems like a pretty important subject to bring up when talking about.
Hi Jesse, I'm totally excited about your nuclear waste video and would love to translate it into German and lend you my voice. Please get in touch with me. I wrote you in Twitter!
How about if there's an EMP, and I mean significant mass EMP strike, that causes the whole grid to go down long term??? That would cause a total instant loss of power to transport fuel for the emergency generators (back up) and no electricity to keep the waste etc cool. The plants would melt down which is far more dangerous than nuclear weapons... Just a thought... Then there are the incidents when nuclear plants leak , etc, melt down to any degree...
Thanks for the scenario, an interesting one. A massive EMP taking out the entire grid would wreak all kinds of havoc on our society. See the convo below for a discussion of the worst case scenario for the waste pools. As to your other point about meltdowns, which I assume you're talking about the reactors here and not the waste pools. Anyways, a meltdown is definitely not more dangerous than a nuclear weapon. We've had three plant meltdowns in nuclear history. Chernobyl (a reactor without containment, which will never be built again) resulted in max 4000 deaths. Three Mile Island resulted in no deaths and Fukushima resulted in zero or one death from radiation (depending on which investigation you privilege). Without downplaying the legitimate fear that those meltdowns created in those local areas, and the healthy fear of meltdowns that has brought nuclear plants to their current level of safety, it is a little irresponsible to compare them to nuclear weapons. The two of which that were deployed against humanity killed somewhere between 120,000 to 230,000 people. Those were 15kt and 22kt bombs. Today's arsenals include thermonuclear weapons 30 times more powerful. We encourage debate on this channel, but we expect commenters to be responsible with their facts. Please be more careful in the future.
Dude just the fact that you are not worried that is what worries me alot because the things man build are the things that are the problem and there are no plans in place to deal with it head on
I appreciate your concern Garry. Honestly the title of the video is true to my journey. I used to be VERY worried about the waste, but the more I learn, the less worried I get. As for whether or not the Deep Geological Repository plan represents an "actual plan" or not, all I can say to that is that we spent sooo many hours talking to the various multi-phd experts that have been hired to test every hypothetical scenario that we can imagine and beyond. And they are the 3rd generation of teams of scientists and engineers that have worked on this plan. There is really no way in a video of this length to do justice to exactly how much work has gone into this plan over decades. To be honest, and I think this comes through in the video, my take away is that WAY too much work has gone into this plan. That these kind of resources could have been better applied to more pressing eco-social problems in our world. But, I understand not wanting to take a stranger's word for it, I invite you to look into it for yourself, you can check out nwmo.ca for example. If what they've got there isn't an "actual plan", then I have never seen an actual plan in my life.
@@garrypietersen7465 You have succumbed to anti-nuke propaganda. Anyone who actually studies the high level waste issue could ever be against nuclear energy because of the waste. One only needs to study Oklo Gabbon's two billion year old nuclear fission waste site to see your concerns are completely unfounded.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk all I can say we will see because humans in general are the problem when building thing they think there is no problem but that is the problem I will come back to you and say I told u so when it happens till then I will wait but I still have my concerns that everyone should have but ya
