Nuclear Waste: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) 

I think as far as dolls go, if one is staring at you, 'unblinking' is exactly what you want.

That “alarmingly laid back man” happens to me my grandfather!

The problem is that we are dealing with this using politics instead of science.

I’m surprised America hasn’t made football fields an actual unit of measurement yet.

I love how he always pick up different topics that aren't talked about 24/7 in other tonight shows

"...she stares unblinking..." yes, but can you imagine how much worse it would be if it did blink?

Hearing him call Hartford a "Big City" basically gave me the same reaction as the Roku guys did to being called a "Big Tech Company." "Look! The TV man called our city a 'Big City!' We aren't boring as fuck and useless to the USA! It's finally happening!"

Missile: *Exploding* Audience: *dying of laughter*

"Naval aircraft were summoned to strafe them with machine-gun fire..." Considering we're talking about waste disposal, that may just be the most American thing I've ever heard.

John has suspicious amount of jokes on American Girl dolls. Someone on that writing team has a history...

This place is held together with chewing gum, string, and paper clips.

I don't think I've laughed at a LWT skit harder than Felicity. It was so funny that she's laughing next to me right no-

Why did we need 5 Sharknado movies when we have freakin radioactive alligators?

The whole Feilicity bit is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

13:13 Watching him act like that doll scared the shit out of him is so damn funny. It's really well edited too. His reaction has me in stitches every single time. If I watch it more than 3 times in a row, I can't breathe from how hard I'm laughing.

Just want to point out that Yucca Mountain was something they had been working on for decades. It was a done deal and the entire industry was preparing for it. Then, when it was shut down, it was done so just before it was scheduled to start receiving waste. It was a major blow. I know this because my wife *is* a nuclear scientist who had to do PR work for the NRC trying to keep them from shutting it down.

Fun fact: That rocket (5:30) crashed since its accelerometer was literally installed upside down. EDIT: First of all thanks for the responses. I have since been studying nuclear engineering in-depth and this piece does miss a few crucial details on nuclear waste. Firstly, a football stadium of nuclear waste from all nuclear power plants across the US over 50 years (providing 20% of clean, safe, non-intermittent energy) is actually remarkably little. I would say it is the necessary evil we need to overcome since at the end of the day nuclear power is a reliable source that is in most respects superior to conventional solar and wind. In the long term, nuclear waste will not be an issue - rather a waste material we can reprocess and generate electricity from - fast breeder reactors.

THE TOXIC AVENGER: The first Avenger that plays League of Legends

It’s been 5 years let’s get a certified John Oliver update on this topic!!!

Radioactive alligators sounds like a Dr. Evil request.

I expected the video to end with Felicity inexplicably being present in the footage from the 70s and John Oliver screaming bloody murder. It didn't happen. I am disappointed.

If someone wants to solve the Cube John is holding, use this Scramble with yellow on top and red in front: B L R' B' F' D' . Yes, we're bored and nerds.

I lived in New Jersey for the 1st 28 years of my life and I can confirm that maybe that nuclear waste dumping, would answer a lot of questions.

As a working Civil Engineer I must say whoever came with the dumb idea to use wood as beams to hold up the tunnels either did that on purpose to cause danger or they are just that stupid. I did inspection for tunnels before and it's usually 13 inch+ walls with rebar everywhere.

i hate that i literally have a felicity doll displayed in my room facing my bed

I've re-watched him screaming at Felicity 5 times now. So great, I'm almost cackling at work.

Yucca Mountain always seemed like an odd place for a nuclear repository given the number of active fault lines in and near western Nevada. North Dakota would probably be the most logical place for this kind of site since it has very little seismic activity and an abundance of underground salt domes (which are ideal for nuclear waste storage)

"We were trying to defeat the Nazis, which fun fact: pretty much all Americans agreed were bad at the time"

The felicity thing killed me

3:39 fun fact, a not insignificant portion of americans supported what the nazis were doing.

3:31 "the Nazis who, fun fact, pretty much all Americans agreed were bad at the time" *checks date* a week after the Charlottesville rally ... that hits hard

I live 41 miles downwind of Hanford. Every family I know has had multiple members go through cancer. I had Thyroid cancer at 34. EVERY single person that helped me in the hospital said they'd already had it. My sistern-in-law, who grew up closer to Hanford than me by about 15 - 20 miles, had Thyroid cancer in her early 20s. If you want to really dig up a mess, look in to the decades of families in Umatilla Oregon that have been trying to get medical assistance from the government and keep getting denied (I mean, maybe some aid has been awarded I'm not aware of, but no where near what their community deserves). A friend of mine worked for the state of Oregon in some fashion as an intern during law school, his summer job was literally to find a way to not admit huge volumes of radioactive material was leaking into the ground water when stacks of paper work clearly showed it was. You can see the bunkers pretty clearly on google maps, SW of Umatilla. They go on for miles. As I understand it, they're all exclusively for storing nuclear material.

"I'm not a nuclear scientist. I just have the face of one." - John Oliver, 2017

As someone who lives relatively close to Hanford in Washington, this was very educational, thank you.

No one: America: We measure how much nuclear waste we have using football fields.

I AM A WAKING NIGHTMARE!

The procrastination in this country is impressive... "Hm, we should prob deal with this... ehhh maybe later."

Not gonna lie, I enjoy watching the Toxic Avenger series. It’s one of those “so bad it’s good” guilty pleasure movies, especially when he was in Tokyo.

RU-vid's most reccomended educational youtuber, Tom Scott made an interesting video about a massive underground nuclear waste storage site in Sweden I think that's worth checking out.

To those commenting that he is bashing nuclear power, where does he do it? All I saw and heard was concern over storing the waste byproduct that is harmful to all forms of life. Seriously, where is is saying nuclear power is wrong? Link the timeframe if he did. If he didn't, stfu with the fake news.

Lets build a wall, and make radioactive alligators pay for it!

And then Deathclaws became a plausible spontaneous evolution...

Quick thing about the doll sidenote. For some reason back when I was about 5, some of my sister's old stuff was stored in my room to make room for more of her stuff, and I woke up one night to find the closet door open with one of those dolls staring at me. And for some reason right as I woke up and stared into its eyes, the eyelids fell shut. I used a nightlight until I was 10 after that.

I love how this show actually educates and informs people.

Ugh, as a nuclear professional, the shear misunderstanding in this piece infuriates me. I've held off watching this video for years and honestly I still wish I never did. "So called spent fuel pools"? No, that IS what they are called. I've personally monitored 2 of them on a daily basis, walking around and under them, for years and worked at several more. They are by no means designed for "temporary storage" since "temporary" is ONLY for 100 years. The danger for a "spent fuel pool accident" is also ridiculous. The ability to strike and destroy a spent fuel pool inside the protection of a nuclear power plant is likely not even capable. That also ignores the fact that there are many, MANY procedures for any issue with the spent fuel pools including attack. Even I couldn't think of a way to do it with unlimited funds and my intimate knowledge. Thankfully we do have dry cask storage now and those casks can literally take a freight train at full speed without losing integrity (I've seen the videos, they are pretty amazing). So the idea we have this tremendous amount of nuclear waste all over is kind of ridiculous. We should have a long term storage site, or sites, to put these casks, but there is no immediate crisis for it.

"We were trying to defeat the Nazis, which, fun fact: pretty much all Americans agreed were bad at the time." Time really does fly, doesn't it.

Meanwhile in france we store every nuclar waste in a site few kilometers underground since at least 50 years...

Recently I completed a short internship at a company which makes storage casks for spent nuclear fuel. Those things are near indescribable. You can hit it with a missile, a plane, or a truck and it is designed to be completely secure. I’m not joking about the missile. The company actually paid for the military to fire a missile at the cask to test it. Another thing is that these casks are SUPER heavy. They are large steel cylinders with a honeycomb type insert where the waste is placed. Once the cask is delivered to the site it is filled with a concrete ring between the honeycomb and the interior wall. At this point the whole thing is just too damn heavy to realistically transport any distance. Just wanted to share some information to whoever is interested. I was just happy to know something about this topic. PS while this information is true as far as I am a-where, I am not an engineer in the industry, just a short term intern so please take my comment with a grain of salt.

My late father was in demolition, blowing up buildings and bridges all over the world. He loved telling stories and I remember one that scared the shit out of me. He was given a no bid contract to blow up an old nuclear smokestack or something. It was a huge project that would take forever to type the whole thing out. He submitted his estimate but never heard back. He wanted to know what the hell was going on so he asked around. He found out that the government decided to instead hire a tree stump blaster who came and stood on the bed of his truck to drill holes in the side and then threw some dynamite in there and blow it up, basically sending millions of bits of Radioactive dust in the air which then blew in the direction of Hanford! Not sure how much of this story is true cause my dad likes to bullshit but he was probably telling the truth because he wasn’t laughing at all.

Fun fact: a football field, 20 feet high is not much, any mall is bigger than that.

Damn you, Felicity!

Sir, wood rots, should we still build a nuclear shed with it? Yup

Wait…ALL the nuclear waste in the COUNTRY could fit in a 20 ft x football field size area? That’s shockingly small. I’m surprised.

At least you can see the alligators coming in the middle of the night with them glowing eyes.

The reason you could never solve that rubik's cube is because it is in an invalid position. I was checking the corner parity of the cube when I realized the Green-White-Orange corner is adjacent to the White, Green, and Orange center squares, but if you imagine rotating the corner either 120° clockwise or counterclockwise, all three of those imagined positions can't line up with the center squares. You'd need to mirror the corner across Green and White, which is obviously impossible. While this wouldn't affect the reason this is invalid, he made only five of the six sides visible in the video when he had it out, so I had to infer what the remaining side looked like. There's only two configurations where all corners and edges are unique, swapping the blue-orange edge with the yellow-orange edge. Neither of these are valid cube positions because of the above mirrored corner problem. I used frame advance to get each side. If you call the front face the one with GYY RRR RGO the unknown side to the left is either of these RYR RBR BBY YBY GYY GYY Top face BBY OYO WGG Bottom face BRW BWG YRG Right face RYO WGG BWW Back face BWW OOO OBO

"We rushed to develop nuclear weapons to defeat the Nazis, which, fun fact, almost all Americans agreed were bad at the time" Rek'd

Quick note on the rocket at about 5:30: that video is from the launch of a russian Proton rocket. It flew off course because some of it’s sensors were installed upside down, apparently using a hammer to fit them into place in a way they weren’t designed for.

As accurate as this is, its scary to me that despite nuclear power being far less dangerous and far cleaner (still not clean or dangerous by any measure, but still the best on a global scal ) we dont have the same attitude to other sources of energy that are even more dangerous and are affecting us right now. Responsible Nuclear power plants in the US right now present no danger until an accident happens which is rare. Other forms of power, regardless of how responsible the people running them are, still pollute and produce more waste and make more land unusable than nuclear power. (Namely coal, oil, and natural gas mining.)

Even if the Yucca mountain storage facility is opened for storage, we'll spend years getting approval to transport the waste. I'm pretty sure plenty of towns will protest any route that gets close to their towns. And there is the matter of a transport vehicle. The government need approval or develop a lot of vehicles.

Washington...Vegas...Boston... War, war never changes

6:21 *Florida intensifies*

Kyle Hill has a video that goes into detail about the solution to nuclear waste, titled "We solved nuclear waste decades ago" and its worth watching to get the scientific side of the story. I like the show and John in general but the info in this episode isn't showing the whole picture.

The American Girl thing is legit, Samantha haunted my nightmares for about two years before I finally managed to give her to my cousin

My sister has American Girl dolls.... 34 of them. Send Help

"the situation", someone needs to make this doc

Oh my gosh I’m laughing so hard right now. I saw The Toxic Avenger on Theater Mode from Achievement Hunter! I died when the trailer started 🤣 because I was like, “wait, I know that movie!!!”

Why does America measure everything in football fields? Edit: wow I did not expect this random comment to get this popular…

I thought we already designated New Jersey as a dumping ground for waste?

I just assumed Florida was already the Nuclear Toilet, I thought that was why Florida is so..... Florida.

Hmm... this would be a good set up for a cyberpunk/post-apocalyptic Netflix series. I would watch that

Can't WAIT to see Felicity in my nightmares! #DamnYouOliver

He didn't bash nuclear energy, he bashed how we're not dealing with the waste properly. Jeeze, it's like a get together of the Children of Atom in the comments.

Anyone else get chills when the reporter said waiting until a crisis appears to deal with problems? Let's jump to 2020 shall we?

You also have to bear in mind that Homer Simpson is in charge of safety for one of those nuclear power plants! Aiiihhh!

So, no Chernobyl Disneyland for 240,000 years? FML.

"The point is, we have a lot of nuclear waste, and it's very fun to play with!" - John Oliver, 2017

Radioactive Alligators... pretty soon we’ll have SCP-682 in our hands, and that’s gonna be a shitshow

I’m going to use this clip as a talking point next time I teach about nuclear power. Great work!

5:27 Okay... who recorded me playing kerbal space program? -_-

"Ugly 'till i's cute again" See? Looking into the mirror for that morning affirmation can provide loads of inspiration, John!

fun fact: the government hired an engineering/management company to oversee the maintenance contract for Hanford, WA. This company had the contract for DECADES to maintain a subterranean concrete vaulted storage facility with nuclear waste. The vault was made with timber, not concrete. Two years ago this company merged with another engineering company to become the largest engineering firm in the world, worth $10 Billion.

@johnoliver You should do a new 2023 segment on this and follow up with current updates. I love your work. Your writing staff and your mind are just fantastic.🤙

I love this show, but why are so many episodes geoblocked? I don't live in Narnia guys, seriously.

I don't think that was the sound of a crank, it was the sound of a Geiger counter...

It's weird watching this and looking out my window at Hanford. Nestled right along the Columbia only a few miles away

If we switched to MSRs/TMSRs, we could use a lot of that waste as fuel and cut the biproduct's like down to a couple hundred years, and at much lower quantities. Plus the energy produced would be clean, cheap, and is way safer than traditional reactors.

His reaction from the doll made me laugh and how he shooed her away XD

Jersey shore makes so much more sense now.

6 years later, still not solved.

Fun fact: That rocket (5:30) crashed since its accelerometer was literally installed upside down.

$700 billion on Afghanistan. Wonder what we could have spent that on...

That Felicity gag just killed me. Or maybe Felicity did and this is my ghost writing this...

John Oliver is a national treasure

"A house without a toilet." It's funny, because when you're actually living in a house without a toilet, you know that you need to go somewhere far away from your home and your water supply, you dig a hole, *and you bury that shit underground where it can decay in peace.* The problem has already been solved. The fact that people are actively getting in the way is madness. It makes me wonder if they never flush their own toilets at home after dinner each night. "Just leave it where it is. It's the safest thing."

I was not expecting a toxic avenger reference...

While stable storage of the waste would be an improvent, if we had the will to build integral fast reactors we could burn the waste to generate energy. The remaining waste that cannot be burned is lightweight elements that decay in a few centuries, much less than the 120k years for plutonium. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

The way that woman talks about contaminating a large portion of the Earth with radioactive material in a total deadpan, with images of rockets exploding in the background, is always so funny to me.

Fun fact: uranium 235, the isotope used in the Chernobyl reactor, has a half life of around 700million years

...can't stop watching this program,wonderful mesh of horror and comedy, much like our lives.

I live 20 miles away from Hanford..... EDIT: for those asking, near Yakima WA