We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago 

*Thanks for watching!* Proud of this one - I hope it’s educational and entertaining enough to share.

Yeah, when I was on the USS Eisenhower back in 1982 (a nuclear aircraft carrier) we had a device in the engine room that could detect very tiny amounts of radioactive particles in the air. The only times I ever saw the detector needle rise much above zero was pulling into Naples, Italy -- and it did that almost every time we pulled in...as soon as we'd get out to sea the needle would drop back. I was told that there was a temperature inversion layer over Naples and what we were reading was Carbon 14 isotopes from coal-burning powerplants.

I really appreciate that a method of impact testing is literally just "hit it with a train".

One of the weird things you learn looking into this matter is that the part of the process of handling nuclear waste that is _most damaging_ to the environment is... The production of all that concrete.

its bizarre that we even need deep isolation. it's not a solution to issue of waste,as you said, it's solved, its a solution to public perception.

Nuclear waste is safer than political waste. You can't just dig a six foot hole for politicians as the environmental damage is too high.

I'm German, and one of the things that I'm actually unhappy with my country is how we've handled nuclear power. In the last century there was a massive anti nuclear energy movement, which led to the downsizing and closing of nuclear power plants. Green party members have been slapping each other's backs for decades over this, but sadly the rising energy requirements massively overtook the rise in renewable energy. What did that mean? Coal plants. I shit you not, hundreds of thousands of people fought for years to exchange clean, nuclear power for horrible dirty coal power. I don't have enough hands to face palm as hard as I want. Big Uranium needs to step up their game.

I live next to one of Finland's biggest nuclear plants, and tbh it's kinda chill here most of the time. The only issue is that we sometimes get weird marine life near the exhaust ports, since their wastewater is naturally warmer than our seas tend to be in the winter. Means that species that couldn't usually live at these latitudes keep turning up with cargo ship ballast waters and chilling there.

The Yucca Mountain repository is exactly why the plants I've worked at, focus so much on what they call "social license" because the public's opinion has the same power to kill a nuclear project, as any stamp/license from any nuclear regulatory body. They strive so hard to maintain a good image in the mind of the local community, the worst thing that's happened at either plant was when they went to test the emergency notification system once, they forgot to add "this is just a test" to the message, and NO ONE was even remotely worried. In fact: I think the company just got roasted on social media for a few weeks. (To be fair, there is an evacuation plan in place for if something were to go wrong, so the fact authorities weren't rolling out busses and pulling people from beds, kinda tipped everyone off that it was a false alarm.)

"Fossil fuel IS the invisible scurge that people imagine nuclear waste to be" Perfectly stated!

The more I learn about nuclear power the more pissed off I become that we haven't used it to its fullest potential

I think it would be really cool if you cite your sources in the description so its easier to navigate for my more academically-inclined friends

My dad is a petroleum engineer in the natural gas industry. I remember when Deepwater Horizon happened, every night when I would say good night, he had a livestream of the leak pulled up. He flat-out refused to see the Deepwater Horizon movie-hit too close to home for him, I guess. And then my uncle was a paralegal on the case against BP. Fascinating and horrifying stuff.

I think what freaks people out is all the precautions. Fossil fuels are worse but we just throw them up into the air so "How bad can they be right?". But nuclear waste needs these concrete tombs and all these security precautions, so even if they're way safer, it freaks people out and makes them think "What if something goes wrong tho?". The only way to fix this is educating people.

Something isn't talked about much is that Chernobyl had other reactors that didn't melt down. They kept the power plant operational, generating electricity until the reactors were deactivated in the 90s and early 2000s.

Most of the years I was growing up my home town had a coal-fired power plant. I think that it was putting out 40x the radiation of a fission plant. Of course, it was just a fraction of the background radiation.

I don't know why but the "big uranium" gag had me dying every time, especially 1:36 and 2:46. Thank you.

30 years ago as a sophomore in physics we did a study and found higher radio activity in the fly ash pile outside a coal plant than outside a nuclear powerplant.

My step father was a trucker with every certification you could imagine. I remember him coming home one night with a flatbed full of those transportation containers. I was surprised they were allowed to stay outside of some facility or another and on truck overnight. He did inform me that they were practically indestructible and far to heavy to steal to boot. Also that they emitted no radiation at all as they were perfectly stable. I haven't feared nuclear power since.

I think the reason the masses are afraid of nuclear waste is because of what people have seen with nuclear weapons and meltdowns and think it's also the same with anything that's a byproduct of nuclear energy. I don't know the full history of fossil fuel discovery (yet) but my theory is it was accepted by people when it was first introduced because it solved a problem (or rather acted as a fuel to solve a problem or make something easier/faster) while the first introduction of nuclear to the masses was destruction.

As a Factorio gamer, I can confirm that going Nuclear reduces the amount of natives trying to kill me than burning coal

Makes me wonder how much impact The Simpsons has had on people’s perception of nuclear power plant safety… 🤔

“Nuclear Waste is SO BAD! It pollutes everything!” “What about the poisoning of the atmosphere with carbon emissions?” “Eh, that’s different.”

I was a maintenance electrician for a company that had a patent on a specific aluminum alloy used to line the casks for storing nuclear waste. Their main customer was Chernobyl. The alloy contained the waste for a longer portion of its halflife requiring fewer times to replace the cask.This was in the early 2000's, I'm sure they've made improvements.

it makes me really angry how misinformed the general population is on nuclear energy.

Retired nuclear engineer here. You should get your production reviewed by an actual nuke before publishing it. Several serious mistakes. The round vertical dry casks stored at nuclear plants contain no waste. Only spent fuel rods. These are extremely valuable when the politics change. Only about 3-5% of the U-235 is burned before neutron-toxic fission products build up enough to require the rods' removal. If these rods are recycled and made into fuel for the mixed liquid fluoride salt reactor, perfected in about 1966, then essentially all the uranium and bred plutonium is burned. Only a tiny amount of actual high level waste is left and the liquid fuel reactor can deal with that problem too. Most of the HLW in a light water reactor is produced by multiple bombardments of fission products with neutrons. That's because the fuel stays in the reactor up to 6 years. In the liquid salts reactor, the coolant/fuel is continuously processed. the fission products are removed before appreciable additional neutron bombardment and new fuel is added. This type of reactor does not have a refueling interval because of continuous recycling. The plant will be shut down for periodic maintenance on motors, pumps, valves, etc., but nothing to do with the fuel side. Low level waste mostly isn't. Radiation workers are told to toss everything that touched something into the LLW barrel. It got so expensive to dispose of this non-waste that TMI-1 hired my company to design and build a separator. This machine streamed stuff from the drums one piece at a time under a large area plastic scintillator. If the item was radioactive, an air jet blew it off the side into a bucket. Clean stuff went off the end of the belt as clean garbage. I typical barrel would yield about a 5 gallon bucket half full of LLW. The correct method of dealing with LLW is incineration and that's what was done for decades. A HEPA filter trapped any flue particulates and a radiation monitor made sure the filter got it all. I don't recall exactly when this practice was stopped but it was a political and not a radiological one. For medium level waste, mostly contaminated pipe and tools, the radioactive material is first removed with a strong acid dip and rinse. It comes out clean and is no longer radwast. I was asked to visit a building outside the fence at Oak Ridge to quote on a radiation monitoring system. Inside the building was a huge stainless steel tank about the size of a home swimming pool full of conc nitric acid. They had a contract to decontaminate the miles of pipe and other stuff that came from the diffusion plant. They'd been at it for about 5 years. Again, they dipped the piece of metal in the acid, then a rinse and the material was ordinary scrap metal. I never asked what they did with the sludge but they probably incinerated it. For HLW, fission and activation products, there is a salt reactor called a burner reactor. The neutron spectrum is adjusted, not for the most efficient fission, but to give the spectrum that would fission or transmute the isotopes up, down or stable. Transmuting up is that it transmutes the isotope to one with a much higher specific activity and a correspondingly short half-life. Transmuting down is transmuting the waste isotope to one with a low specific activity and correspondingly long half-life. It remains radioactive for a long time but the activity is so low as not to matter in most cases. Still others are transmuted into a stable (non-radioactive) isotope. The tiny amount of radioactive residue that remains is a good candidate for deep well burial. That company you talked to snookered you. Dropping the stuff down a well is fine but there is no need to drill any new holes. There are thousands of spent oil and gas wells, some as much as a mile deep, available for the job. Drop the stuff in, cover it with a few hundred feet of concrete to keep ground water out, cap it back off, this time welding on the cap and properly label it and be done with it. Regarding other sources of nuclear waste, you really should mention the Kingston coal plant disaster in east TN, not far from Oak Ridge and the Watts Bar nuclear plant. On December 22, 2008, a flyash settling pond dike broke and emptied the pond into the Clinch river. Millions of gallons of the stuff, loaded with radioactive materials, heavy metals (mercury and lead) arsenic and other poisons poured into the river. It turned the river white for miles. Even now I can drive over there with my survey meter and detect high radioactivity in the sludge still on the river bank.

When I worked in a power plant, most of our "nuclear waste" was used contaminated clothing like rad suits or scrubs that get crated up, shipped out for decontamination, and recycled.

I didn’t realise how little I knew, I genuinely thought it was radium being out in the ground with a millennia half life. Power is such an issue and we need a better solution and yet we have been told to fear the best solution we have. Trying to do the right thing for the future is such a difficult thing when you have no idea what the choices even are

I love how the thumbnail uses the Uranium waste from Satisfactory, because that can actually be completely destroyed, so it's not a big issue either.

Never underestimate the power of large numbers of highly ignorant people to stand in the way of the best solution because they have unfounded notions about it.

There’s a whole chapter on this in the book called “fake catastrophes and invisible threats of doom” Written by one of the founding members of Greenpeace who left when he realized he was the only actual scientist on the board.

6:29 I would agree with you. As long as you don't eat any berries from Prypiat you won't have any health problems, but if you live in a place like Bejing you don't just need to wear a mask to not contaminate your lungs, but also will likely need to put up with horrible smell of all those fumes

To me, this comes down to a handful of issues: 1. Lack of science literacy amongst the general population. 2. Lack of energy infrastructure (nuclear or renewable) to mitigate the environmental cost of mining, refining, and disposing of nuclear fuel. 3. Lack of political/economic will to expand nuclear energy due to the order-of-magnitude higher cost in building/fueling/maintaining nuclear energy facilities versus “traditional” fossil fuel plants (regardless of how much more efficient and clean they are). 4. The perceived risk of an accident at any point along the processes described above. Humans, for better (evolutionarily) or worse (environmentally) are, will be and, have always been keenly interested in their own personal and immediate benefit above all else. The only way to truly get our attention, as a species/society, is to convince us that something (real or manufactured) threatens our personal survival. Not next year, or in decades, or our children in the future, but you and me…right now. It is sad, but it is accurate.

I'm a marine engineer. Here's a little tidbit of knowledge: when we bunker fuel (diesel), we get a sheet of paper with the analysis of it. This covers contaminants, CCAI (calculated carbon aromatic index), flashpoint, yada yada. But here's what not many people know. These fuels are full of iron, copper, nickel and much more (which is just called "ash"). When we burn fossil fuels, we are literally blasting these micro-contaminents into the atmosphere, which you then breath. It is a well studied phenomena that people living close to large ports are affected greatly by these things I have mentioned, and even more! Fatigue, pneumonia and coughs with either blood or black phlegm. Nuclear, when done safely (as anything should be) is so non-lethal in comparison it's funny.

One problem I have with deep disposal is that what people want to dispose of, is unused uranium. When the plant I work for removes spent fuel rods from the reactor, the uranium isn't all spent. In fact, most of the uranium still exists and can be reprocessed. Japan and France reprocess spent fuel rods, and so should we.

The deep isolation, bore hole storage, finally now makes a lot of sense. Seems the way to do it.

I think something that is overlooked is one item you hit on - the actual quantity of waste, and that it's not truckloads and truckloads of material. We are led to believe that there are massive truckloads of waste from each and every plant, and the truckloads appear to be the Low and Medium Level waste that will solve itself - not what they have told or tried to convince us of.

I remember doing a research paper on this back in high school. Was surprised at how sophisticated the technology already was and how pretty much all needed solutions have already been found. Really goes to show how divorced from reality most people's perceptions of nuclear power are.

I'm happy that the Oklo natural nuclear pile got a mention here in the specific sense of how far the waste products (didn't) get. It's one of my favorite bits of nuclear trivia, and a great indicator of the comparative safety.

My dad actually works at WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant), Which just so happens to be the one of the US's main storages for nuclear waste. He manages the shipments of the waste and properly sorts them to where they need to go.

Your content is a tremendously helpful resource for those of us that are simply trying to learn about nuclear topics. It’s hard to learn these days without running into bad-faith grifters.

I was already all in on nuclear power, but this really just hit the nail on the head for me. I couldn't be more agreeing

I always remember the video series on nuclear powered submarines by Destin from "Smarter Every Day". The funniest thing to hear there was that he, equipped with a small geiger counter, would always be exposed to more radiation on the surface than even near the nuclear reactor in the submarine.

Great video. While I still think power plants are scary, the main thing I remember (and try to bring across to other people) is that ultimately, the choice between nuclear and fossil is a choice between evitable and inevitable disaster. A choice between maybe being poisoned if things go horribly wrong, versus DEFINITELY being poisoned when everything is going according to plan.

I am pro-nuclear power.

this is perfect. ive had civil arguments with people i know and the only argument they can ever raise about nuclear power is "what about a meltdown" or "but the waste" so this is the last piece of the puzzle i needed to help educate them. thanks man!

My grandfather worked in Westinghouse’s Nuclear division and was directly responsible for half a dozen plants in his career and no one would listen to him about the safety and security of how waste was treated. I wish he had you and RU-vid in the 80s, Kyle.

*Summary* - *Intro (**0:00** - **0:52**):* Debunks the misconception of nuclear waste as glowing green goo, asserting it's safely managed and stored. - *Public Perception of Nuclear Waste (**0:55** - **2:01**):* Discusses public fears about nuclear waste, emphasizing misconceptions and the actual safety of nuclear waste management. - *Definition and Origins of Nuclear Waste (**2:01** - **2:59**):* Explains what nuclear waste is and its sources, including nuclear power production and medicine. - *Waste Management and Environmental Impact (**2:59** - **5:05**):* Argues that properly managed nuclear waste has no known environmental or health effects, contrasting this with the harmful effects of fossil fuel waste. - *Comparison with Fossil Fuel Waste (**5:05** - **7:14**):* Highlights the significant environmental impact of fossil fuel waste compared to nuclear waste. - *Types of Nuclear Waste and Management (**7:16** - **10:01**):* Details the types of nuclear waste (low, intermediate, high level) and their management, emphasizing the minimal volume of high-level waste. - *Transportation and Safety of Nuclear Waste (**10:01** - **11:40**):* Describes the indestructible nature of nuclear waste transport casks and their safety record. - *Deep Geological Disposal Solution (**11:59** - **15:03**):* Advocates for deep geological disposal of high-level nuclear waste as an efficient, safe solution. - *Deep Isolation Technique (**15:03** - **17:04**):* Discusses deep isolation's borehole technology for nuclear waste disposal, offering a promising, convenient alternative to large repositories. - *Closing Remarks and Call for Public Acceptance (**17:04** - **18:08**):* Emphasizes the importance of public acceptance for advancing nuclear waste solutions and nuclear power as a clean energy source.

10:46 The train, a British Rail class 46, was travelling at about 100mph and has 1,962hp. That is an impressive feat of the nuclear container

Funnily enough, I learned about nuclear power playing minecraft. There was a mod for the game called BigReactors. The mod dev did a lot of research into real nuclear power. so when 13 year old me noticed that the waste my reactor produced wasn't harmful, i googled if it's the same in real life. been for nuclear ever since :)

I remember being shown that clip amongst others of the waste transportation devices during my radiation and contamination training I was really hoping you'd show that clip of them throwing a goddamn train at it And you're not exaggerating, they're as close to indestructible as you can get, its honestly amazingly impressive

Thank you. This helped my understanding.

My favorite video from you thus far. It was awesomely structured and presented. I loved how you handled its comedic moments; distributed properly and very well delivered. Also, everything made sense. Bravo!

Awesome video! I lived in parts of South Korea where people would protest nuclear reactors (even though there were none in the vicinity) for years. Just standing outside with banners and protesting, especially after Chernobyl became popular on Netflix. Just for funsies, I went to visit one of the bigger reactors here a few years back and it was an incredible experience. Not only is the safety absolutely stellar and they've worked out all of the little issues decades ago, but they literally are able to produce these types of reactors in 2-3 year time at any location, except that...nobody in Korea wants them anymore. They also had one of these fun impact videos to show, except that instead of a train it was fighter jet filmed to collide with one of the nuclear facility domes to demonstrate the safety...crazy stuff Following the Fukushima disaster, there's been an unfortunate push against the use of reactors and a dramatic increase in coal energy use which turned this place very similar to Beijing. Just yesterday the pollution outside was so bad I could taste it in my mouth even though I was wearing a mask. I have to buy HEPA filters every 3 months for the in-house use and even then they turn pitch black after 90 days. This is the future without nuclear power Oh and yes...definitely time to relocate. The pollution levels were never that bad here and it's only been getting worse every year because of the anti-nuclear rhetoric

as a Health Physics Tech working i decommissioning job atm, i love how accurate all of your statements are. The amount of times i explain these kinds of things to people and they just don’t seem to care is insane. People can just get so set in there own ways.

Imagine being a genius who invented a clean and efficient power source with little to no problems only for movies and media to make it look bad and the public to prefer huge fossil fuel plants that literally destroy the air quality.

Grew up watching you and Kurzgesagt and I am 200% Nuclear power.

Or we could reprocess the high level waste back into useable fuel. When I’ve worked outages at my local NPP, I remember learning in training on the basics of nuclear power, that ~98% of that “waste” is actually uranium that could still be fissioned. The reason it’s not is because daughter products from the reaction begin to inhibit sustaining the fission reaction within the fuel bundle. We don’t really need a “million year solution” for our high level waste, because we’d probably dig it back up after 100.

I spent 12 years in the Navy, our surf and sub nukes (nuclear propulsion officers) always had a bragging point that went like this: who do you think is more at risk of getting radiation related cancer, people working in the nuclear engine room, or f-18 pilots? The answer is f-18 pilots because they'll often be capped with their wrists exposed to the sun for 8 hours. Its crazy how dangerous nuclear power can be, but how safe it becomes in the right hands.

For those worried about a Chernobyl type disaster: nuclear power plants are so much more safe now that a similar disaster is virtually impossible.

I feel like this is one of the most important youtube videos ever made

Thank you! More people need to know about this.

I work in nuclear fuel manufacturing and I love seeing videos showing how safe it actually is. Also all the trash and the gloves we wear in the hot area are burned in a incinerator, then the ash is processed and the little bit of uranium that’s in it, is put back into the cycle and use to make more fuel, there is almost no waste

I’m so glad I found your channel I’ve always had a fascination/obsession with nuclear power and radiation in general. Just knowing something you can’t see with your own eyes can cause such destruction is mind blowing.

The biggest problem with nuclear energy seems to be human error which sadly cant get patched.

Late to the party, but fun story: My grandfather was a civil engineer specializing in groundwater. He worked for the majority of his career at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington. His job was basically to say, "We are supposed to store our waste on site because nothing else exists, where's the safest place to put it? In some ludicrously impressive engineering solving complicated sets of partial differential equations, he basically calculated that, even if you removed the concrete and casks and everything, if you just put Uranium out in the Hanford reach, diluted enough to keep it subcritical, it would do... nothing. I think he calculated that it would go at most a few cm. The reason is that the location he was looking at for storing the waste was on a huge basalt flow, and it's just... continuous, igneous rock. There's just nowhere for anything to go, even if you try dissolving it in water or whatever, because it's just... solid rock. Also, he was sometimes accused of being a shill, just because he said the waste storage solutions were safe and nobody could believe that. Beside the fact that he published his conclusions in a paper for all (who have the math chops to follow his work) to see, he liked to respond that "My drinking water is the first to come out of the Columbia River after Hanford." He never bothered moving upstream.

"They weigh as much as the world's heaviest door", gee thanks, that's the most useful unit of measure I have never used!

The rejection of nuclear power is my biggest frustration with the green movement. Nuclear power is my litmus test for whether someone is serious about caring for the environment or actually addressing climate change.

The problem is that before the salutations we dumped 100 of tones at sea

Kyle: makes a compelling series of videos on the dangers of nuclear energy Also Kyle: makes probably THE most compelling argument for the safety and efficiency of nuclear power Thanks for showing us both sides of the coin man. Appreciate all this great info

I got lucky that this was taught at my middle school almost 25 years ago. One of the science teachers had majored on the subject and the school let him teach a week long course about nuclear energy and waste. By the time I got there it was a required course for all 8th graders to take and I've been an advocate for nuclear power ever since. Over the decades this brief education has helped me assuage the fears of many people in my own life about nuclear power; so thank you for sharing this on such a big forum and always keep up the good fight Kyle!

Thank you for this! You have definitely helped me see nuclear energy in a more positive way. It makes me wonder why on earth we are still using coal!

I remember playing a minecraft map called deep water horizon, where you had to do certain tasks in a certain amount of time to avoid it exploding (I did not succeed). This video reminded me of just how little the decision makers of the world actually care about their people.

I like how the image of “hazardous” waste he used isn’t even from the Simpsons. It’s from Satisfactory. That’s how pervasive these myths are.

This is one of the things that drives me crazy about the "green" movement- they reject the only practical solution currently available and insist that we abandon our infrastructure for things that are not possible in the short term.

You're smart and I like you. Thanks for making approachable content about complex things.

Thank you for this informative video Kyle! There's so much misinformation and lack of knowledge of the actual details on this topic that it makes so many of the ethical takes (sometimes even those written by professional philosophers sadly) on this issue nearly redundant.

In high school, I did an essay on nuclear power and went into class and presented it, my conclusion was that nuclear power was better than we think it is and that we should really work towards nuclear energy since it's cleaner and much more efficient, ofc my class thought I was crazy, but I stud by it and I still do

Yeah, I read about that incident. They found a can of cobalt iirc and started playing with it because it glowed. Then brought it home so the kids could play with it. That entire area became a hotspot for a while. But, that was from a piece of medical equipment abandoned in a closed clinic. It was a fine powder that went *everywhere.* Not exactly apples to apples with nuclear waste from a power plant.

I love that people are like "screw fossil fuels" okay let's use nuclear power "no, I was told that's bad"

This is honestly so fascinating! I wish this was talked about more and people were better educated on these things. I never realized the sheer number of precautions that actually go into making this waste as safe as possible! I think that if more people learned about all the things you teach on here they would be more open to nuclear energy. Ultimately it's not as dangerous as people think it is. The lessons we've learned on nuclear tech are lessons learned through pain and blood but those lessons have lead to many procedures and processes that help protect against a repeat event.

It continues to be depressing to me that nuclear power hasn't been more widely accepted in the United States. New gen technology is so much better than what most of the current plants are.

This. All of this. I worked in radioactive waste for several years, and it was a real eye-opener to just how safe the nuclear industry is.

Yo shout out to Kyle for educating me so much. Just restarted the half life histories videos you made and now learning about how nuclear energy works and how the waste is dealt with is really cool. You are doing great work man!! Thank you and keep it up!!!🙌🏾🙌🏾💪🏾☢️☢️☢️

i love the extra detail of the thumbnail with the blue outline for the real example. it's not gonna be glowing, but if it somehow still did, the glow would be blue.

I learned that nuclear energy is safer than the movies depict not too long ago, but I'm glad I found this video to learn more about that. Thank you, Kyle.

Yup. I remember seeing that train vid online, I think it was a pr thing, they wanted to prove to the public how safe those things are. I also really appreciate contrasting our fear of nuclear waste with the reality of fossil fuel. I say "our" because I know and accept the facts but there is still the hind brain fear illogically sitting there.

Man. If there was just one thing I could make everyone understand it would be this.

There was a lot of mismanagement of waste in the beginning, and that has really stuck in people's minds.

Imagine how much more efficient we would be if Chernobyl didn’t happen.

Unfortunately improper management of waste in the past has tainted the public consciousness. Sites like Hanford, WA were incredibly mismanaged in the early days, so people think this is still how we do things. This borehole project could have been done at likely every site for less than we have already spent on the now defunct Yucca Mountain project.

I personally am adverse to giving any channel w/more than a million subscribers my thumb-up... but I believe this message should be heard. Way to go, Kyle!

I spent the last 4 years doing nuclear projects. Primarily as a “Dry Cask Storage Technician” where I was on a team that moved spent nuclear fuel from the Spent Fuel Pool into Dry Cask Storage. I also worked as a “Waste Specialist” and most recently as a Oversight Specialist, where I was responsible for observing and reporting on GTCC waste activities. GTCC is “Greater than Class C Waste”. Nuclear energy is horribly misrepresented and the public really does need to understand the truth about it. It’s a great form of energy. I actually worked at the nuclear plant you mentioned “on the beach” for two years.

It's a phenomenon similar to air travel. People were so scared of suffering an accident, that more than enough regulations have been passed to throw air travel all the way into being much safer than the "good old reliable" car.

Thing is, whenever the general public hears about "nuclear" stuff in the news, it is MOST CERTAINLY about either a *nuclear reactor leakage* or *nuclear weapons,* so no matter how "safe" nuclear material are in actuality, the public perception of nuclear topics will always be *"negative"* in most scenarios.

I like how nuclear power is thought to be some magical power source but its literally just, “Steam power squared.”

Interested in Thorium rather than Uranium for power. From what I've read it seems a better choice.

If those are Coal Plants just in the US, I can’t imagine the volume of contamination in China where most international production goes. Very interesting. Never knew about deep isolation.

In the part where Kyle mentioned the harmful effects of proper storage and use of fossil fuels he should have mentioned the fact people used to use leaded gasoline

Thank you for taking on the misconceptions regarding nuclear waste and nuclear power! We need nuclear power to confront fossil fuel driven climate change.