I literally have learned nothing from this video as I did not get FPV iPhone video documentation of Amy getting a paper towel prescription from inside of an active dry cask. Way to drop the ball HAI
You’d get a smaller dose on site, than you’d get on the airplane trip to the site. This has been demonstrated many times. This is mostly an unserious video that hardly does any justice to the trade offs and risks to various energy solutions, of which Nuclear is the clear winner. @5:20 yeah but how many people died? 3 dozen? Uncited stats show your bias here
To give an example as to why wait 40-60 years. The water released at Fukushima has a half life of 20 years (or at least the wast majority of the radioactive material in it). Many parts in a nuclear plant has the same kind of halflife. Meaning after 40-60 years will make the radiation only 4-8 times less radioactive in those parts. Meaning it's much more easy to work with it since not the same precautions/procedures has to be used.
My father used to work in nuclear decommissioning. He retired earlier this year and the projects he was working on wouldn't be finished for at least another 100 years. He explained plenty to my family about this, and the video is prettt much spot on.
The bad thing is the lifetime membership to nebula is the same as a 20 year subscription with the curiosity stream bundle deal, which is really just too much of a commitment.
It definitely won't stay the same price for 20 years, but even so, this seems more like a member pledge than a bargain. Which i dont really have a problem with
Hey! I worked at Duane Arnold pre-shutting down. And while it's true the storm was the last day of operation, it was planned to be closed later that year anyway. It was always planned to be the long decommissioning, not because they were short of money, but because it's way cheaper. Unverified but I heard it was like $1 billion in that fund, and the parent company could actively use for other things, so long as it's repaid. It was financially better to just wait it out and use that capital for other things, then just dump it to fast close a plant with almost 0 ROI.
Vermont Man is a superhero who was born from the ashes of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. When the plant was demolished in 2014, some of its radioactive components were dumped in a landfill near his home. Vermont Man was just an ordinary guy who liked maple syrup and skiing, until he accidentally stumbled upon the toxic waste and got exposed to a massive dose of radiation. Instead of killing him, the radiation gave him incredible powers, such as super strength, flight, and the ability to shoot laser beams from his eyes. Vermont Man decided to use his powers for good, and became the protector of the Green Mountain State. He fights against evil villains, such as New Hampshire Man, who wants to annex Vermont and make it part of his granite empire, and Quebecois, who tries to sabotage Vermont's dairy industry with his army of mutant moose. Vermont Man is a beloved hero who always stands up for justice, freedom, and maple candy.
he fights crime with his 2 sidekicks, roBen and Jerryboy. He occasionally works with the Courageous ANd Almighty Defenders of Amity (C.AN.A.D.A) in maple syrup-related operations and in battles against Quebecois (a former member of C.AN.A.D.A that went rogue and used their powers to mutate the once-heroic moose army)
There are multiple reactors in my home state that are entombed, and my understanding of the technical details is limited but as far as I know, these were single circuit reactors (Water goes straight in and straight out) for weapons grade plutonium production and are hard to dismantle and remove, very dirty and lightly contained reactors, hence the decision to entomb them. Also they are far from any towns or cities and in the middle of a very large government reservation, so there's no one who could conceivably complain that they are an eyesore or want to redevelop the site.
The people who lived in the town before it was forcibly evacuated by the military might have complained a bit. Not to mention the people that drive through it from Vantage to Othello.
Actually extracting plutonium from the waste isn't that hard, it's just the thought of other countries proliferation concern with using the plutonium for nefarious reasons. Being the US, we try to not make this a concern by not extracting the plutonium.
@@derpymcderpello5381We should just convert it to MOX and rhrow it into another reactor. That's a much better way of ensuring that it'll never fall into the wrong hands.
@@jeffbenton6183 Thats a good point, but making MOX means making plutonium first and then mixing that with uranium. There would still be concerns by the public that plutonium has to be handled and separated independently first before being mixed with uranium. I will say that I think the use of MOX instead of simply plutonium would significantly lower proliferation concerns. Maybe we should start doing that.
In Wales there is a powerplant called Trawsfynydd that was activated in the 1960s & has been undergoing the decommissioning process since the 1980s. It was one of the first nuclear power stations so nobody had any idea how long decommissioning would take.
Imagine getting a job shutting down a nuclear power plant, and having to explain to your whole family that it’s not as “temporary” of employment as it sounds 😂
I'd suggest titling this something more specific than shut down, because it might be confused with the time it takes to stop the reaction and pump out the decay heat.
For radioactive containment, sometimes it's just Portland cement. Cement proper is denser than concrete, providing better gamma radiation protection. Some special cements even have boron and high-z metals added to further increase gamma blockage. Concrete is cheaper and performs nearly as well as cement, so for common construction it's the easy answer. But when the stakes are high, many decommissioning projects opt for the extra expense of pure cement
@@Spencergolde No, you never encase anything in pure cement. Its never just Portland cement, and not any other type of pure cement either. Cement is just dry powder. If you use it to build something, the next gust of wind will blow all your cement away. What you do instead is mix cement with water, and that gives you concrete. You can add additional ingredients like sand to make it more economical, certain metals to make it more radiation proof, Styrofoam to make it less dense, or whatever other property you need. But the really important part is that you add water during your mixing process.
I think the SAFATOR method was used for the NS Savannah. She was retired in '72, but it wasn't until a few years ago that the decommissioning process was completed, and the still hot components of her reactor were removed. Don't quite remember if her nuclear license has been revoked yet to complete the process on paper, but hopefully soon she'll be open on a regular basis as a museum ship rather than just for special events.
I’m still surprised Savannah was saved from the ship breakers and actually had a chance of being a museum, especially with all the hassle that turning her into a museum would require.
@@AndyHappyGuy she's still not safe from the scrapyard: it's still an expensive project to purchase and maintain once the Maritime Administration releases possession of her, and I don't know if anyone's made an offer yet. I know the nonprofit that's been running the museum aspect of the ship is likely to have the right to first refusal, but they still need the cash flow to support it.
One of the quicker decommissionings (at least partial, and on paper) has been Crystal River, FL. Was shut down for a major refurb which went badly wrong (see wikipedia for a summmary), so turned into a full decommissioning project.
Construction for the only Nuclear Power Plant in my State started in 1975. Because it was planned in an Earthquake Zone, they decided to move it by 70m, possibly so that it isn´t directly on a fault line. Commercial Operation started in August 1987. It turned out that moving it by 70m was done without permission. In general the Law which regulated the use of Nuclear Power Plants was violated several times. (Also it is said that it was build in a Flood Plain and close to an active Volcano, but as far as i know this didn´t matter in the Decision). Because of that Violations Court decided to shut it down in September 1988. In 2002 the fuel Rods were removed. In 2009/2010 Turbines, the Generator and other Parts were removed and sold to Egypt. In 2018/2019 the cooling tower was demolished. The complete reconstruction is expected to be finished by 2029.
Mainly because Co60 is the driving factor for a transportation standpoint (one of the highest radiation dose contributors). 50 years is because the half-life Cobalt 60 is 5.3 years. 10 half lives is a good safety factor for it to be “gone” (for the purposes of decon) The 1170 keV and 1330 keV gammas from its decay are highly penetrating, so shielding it for shipment (as well as the individuals that have to handle it) is very impractical.
1300? Damn, I knew it was hot, but that's crazy toasty!! That does make sense to me now why you'd want more than one or two half lives before hanging out with Co60.
To those 3/4 as interested. The "bad thing" of transporting the material until it has been in water for years is that nuclear fuel is like a fire you can't put out, all you can do is keep it cool until it naturally goes off. It is not just hot, it is continually becoming more hot, making more heat as the fuel gets used up, and you need that heat to go somewhere otherwise you will eventually melt whatever is holding it since the maximum temperature it can get to is in the order of ridiculous. The water helps get rid of the heat it is producing and is needed until the rate of making heat is low enough that it becomes safe to handle without actively cooling it off. The half life also describes the number of years before the amount of heat it constantly produces is cut in half meaning it takes a long time for the rate to go down enough.
It’s really sad that nuclear power plants are being decommissioned since it’s an extremely safe, reliable, efficient and carbon free way of generating electricity
The problem is that nuclear power is incredibly expensive to build and maintain. Uranium enrichment is very inefficient in terms of cost and mined material, while Thorium reactors simply aren't viable outside of lab settings yet. Coupled with the fact that nuclear plants cost billions of dollars and roughly a decade to build (and those are projections, in reality almost every plant had large cost and time overruns) means that nuclear power is only viable in certain situations. France had cheap nuclear power for decades because of several factors, including cheap uranium from their former African colonies and refusing to properly upgrade their plants, which means their reactors are too old to run safely on average. In the next decade, the French government will likely have to spend tens of billions bringing all their plants up to code or switch to largely renewables as well, with the latter option probably being the more beneficial one from an economic standpoint.
There's nothing wrong with decommissioning old nuclear plants, especially the Gen I and Gen II plants that are horribly inefficient, not as safe or waste-savy as they should be, and not designed to operate for the length of time they've been operating at. The shame would be to shutter these archaic reactors without reinvesting in new Gen IV reactors
fun fact it also takes about a decade to decommission a coal power plant, the only reason they dont take longer because of radiation is because basically all of a coal power plants radiation goes straight into the air!
Yeah like... Coal power plants are actually more radioactive than nuclear power plants and they just pull up with open top container trains that saturate the area in... is it Carbon-14 that has the radioactive particles?
@@VitaeLibra the open top coal trains arent a huge issue, might be abit of coal dust that it the radiation is when its burnt, lots of impurities in coal that are radioactive like radium and radon, as well as just uranium too
@@vincentgrinn2665 7 stand corrected then... I swear I heard that it was the trains transporting it across vast distances that was the issue. But what you're saying honestly sounds even worse. If you have time, would you mind elaborating?
@@VitaeLibra i dont know a ton of the details but basically youre burning the coal at high temperatures which probably does chemistry stuff but also it concentrates all the impurities, the plants can burn most of the coal, but all the impurities end up in the ash, both the stuff left inside the furances and what leaves through smoke stacks which poses a radiation risk for people both around coal plants and the landfill the ash is dumped in, it can also bind to water and soil in both instances its not a huge amount of radiation though, background radiation is 300 millierem living near a coal power plant adds 1.8millierem living near a nuclear power plant adds 0.01 millierem the coal dust from transport is apparently only minor, 8 micrograms per m3 compared to 5 micrograms of a regular freight train for comparison living near a major road is 280 micrograms per m3 of particulates
Fun fact, Chernobyl wasn't actually shut down until the end of 2000. Over 14 years after reactor 4 blew up. The last reactor to shut down was reactor 3, for those playing at home, its the one next to reactor 4. Full defuelling and decommissioning wasn't done until 2015
for those who believe pot fights cancer, this is like some sort of epic battle experiment, like buttered toast on the back of a cat dropped out a window
A big part is still that we are rather paranoid about any radiation. Not to say you can just put a wreaking ball to it, but things can be done safe enough with a lower standard.
A demolition crew would probably do fine tearinf down certain aspects, but if you send a wrecking ball in the wrong place, you have alpha and beta particles floating around in the air and getting carried by the wind. Not good to inhale. Also if you ever have gotten an xray, you know that the radiology tech is behind a shield of some sort. You can handle an xray every now and then, but if you do it frequently and continuously then you risk health complications including cancer. It's not so much about paranoia as it is about just not wanting to be a House MD episode on why your leukemia is manifesting so aggressively.
Letting the whole thing rot and then actually coming back and dismantling it 10 years later? Thats exactly what happened to historic Tiger Stadium in Detroit from 2000-2009. That grass, although the stands had several different iterations, was home to the baseball team for almost 90 years. Home to the Detroit Lions for almost 50 years. I took pictures the last day it was fully intact. It was sad seeing it languish for almost a decade.
Vermont Man? Dude, you've gotta be careful saying something like that. With the lack of creativity at Disney, some exec over there is probably on the phone right now to his lawyer getting ready to offer you a deal for three movies, a Disney+ series, and a She-Vermont Man spinoff. Before you know it, I'll be wasting my Saturday nights watching them fight the Hartford Hacker and Boston Boy to save New England from yet another diabolical plot. I freaking hate Boston Boy. He's SO freaking obnoxious and opinionated. This is all your fault, Sam.
0:30 TIL that 2051 is only 18 years away. Now it's time to speculate; which decade is going to be mysteriously erased from the history books? I hope it's this one.
Correction - the spent fuel was not, and will not be for the foreseeable future, transported anywhere off site. GTCC waste (Greater than class C waste - yes, there are 4 types) created at any nuclear power plant in the US is stored on site at an Intermediate Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI). Currently, there is no federal repository to receive GTCC waste in the US.
Shooting ourselves in the foot by not having built a national waste repository. It's moronic for the federal government to have just given up on yucca mountain or anything similar
I'd like to make a small correction to this video: I actually won't be born for another 15 years (I'm a time traveler from the year 2076, and I came back from that most auspicious year to better understand the leadup to and causes of the second revolutionary war), so I will not in fact be old enough to vote by then. I will only be 13 years of age, and a bill to raise the voting age all the way to *_30_* gets passed by the Revolutionary Liberty Council in the year 2033.
Vermonter here, and Vermont Yankee had a few other issues that lead to its closure, such as a cooling tower collapsing, finding small but increasing amounts of radioactive tritium leaking from an underground pipe, and some cesium-137 that no one is 100% sure where it came from. While natural gas was the final nail in the coffin, there was so much leading up to its inevitable closure. Also, during the decommissioning, a train enroute to the plant derailed.
Help, I forgot my jackhammer in my concrete closet and now I want it but I cant get to it because I need my jackhammer that I forgot in my concrete closet.
That wouldn’t be the case for plants with SNRs, right? Every such design that I’ve seen have the reactors be self-contained and safely removable, fast.
Yes and no, it depends very much on the design - "SMR" is more of a power classification that an exact design architecture currently - and on the regulator in your country/state - some regulators, like in Canada, can be overburdensome and require a concrete containment building around ALL nuclear power plant cores. This would hamper the easy commissioning and decommissioning, but is not necessary in regards to public safety so long as the safety systems are thoroughly designed. I hope that the CNSC revises the containment building requirement in light of upcoming SMR developments.
I went to Elizabethtown College which is the only college in the United States that has ever been closed due to a nuclear disaster. It is a little less than 9 miles from Three Mile Island.
I feel like the name of the video should be different. Maybe "why it takes 7 + years to decommission a nuclear power plant" or "free up the land" or "destory the facility." Shut down seems to imply something else. For example, if a reactor is scrammed it no longer producer power for the grid. That sounds like a shut down doesn't it? I mean if you shut down a generator and not destroy it, it stops producing power and is available to be turned on again. Also I didn't even know SAFSTOR was a thing, I thought either the fast decommission for controlled process or the concrete tomb for meltdown aftermath were the only options.
A scrammed reactor keeps generating heat. Fukushima's reactors were scrammed automatically before the tsunami but still partially melted down. But yes, the title was a bit vague and counterintuitive.
Totally missed the opportunity for a Tommyknockers reference. Spoiler alert, it's a 36 year old horror novel where Vermont Yankee plays a key psychological role. The protagonist is an anti-nuclear activist author who gets blackout drunk to avoid his fears of nuclear annihilation, until aliens arrive and replace that clean nuclear power with the most expensive and harmful form of power known to man, alkaline C and D cell batteries.
Chernobyl’s new sarcophagus is designed to have remotely operated robot arms dismantle the reactor so it can be removed for safer storage, since the sarcophagus is only designed to last about 100 years.
Basically, every Post apocalyptic movie is wrong and there shopuld be no survivors because the radiation of all those power plants will kill everything.
Now I desperately want the next MCU movie to be about a man who stumbled into a radioactive Vermont lamdfill and now fights crime on the streets of Burlington as Vermont Man, with all the powers of Vermont trash
Force shutting down "due to environmentalist organisations" ..... So sad. Fun fact you could also make a vid on: Nuclear Powerplants are the highest yielding, safest and cleanest method of converting energy only second to Hydro Power Plants - Dams- due to nuclear waste classified as environmentally dangerous being miniscule, the fuel acquisition and processing making the fuel extremely dense and "spent" fuel being recyclable into fuel again (most often the spent fuel pellets are dumped into storage before the pellets' material has even converted half of its energy potential) not to mention it's partially renewable, advances technology for "green energy" much more rapidly and is several hundred thousand times more space efficient than currently common "green" energy. Deteriorated or outdated tech needs to be checked and maintained, renewed and swapped by all means. It's no less intense on the maintenance than any old other power plant, it just has a higher potential hazard level, even if said hazard level is on a minute percentage in regular cases.
germans just found a way to gas people on a more global scale so they shut down all the atomic plants to free up the workers to produce more co2 from brown coal
Yeah, if you don't mind the tons of ionizing radiation-emitting material that we have no safe place to put. If you ignore all that, totally clean and safe!
@@romulusnrNo safe place to put? You mean large scale nuclear waste storage doesn’t exist? Wow, I guess the Finns have been lying about their nuclear storage facility. Or most of Europes storage facilities. And if you want to talk about radiation emitting energy production, look at coal. A coal power plant of similar size to a nuclear power plant emits far more ionizing radiation than a nuclear plant.
@@bredcubed1161 Finnish storage facility? You mean the one that took 20 years to build and isn't even actually being used yet? Might be a teensy bit premature to declare it a glowing success before it's even open. In fact, this kind of blind pollyanna optimism is probably the most startling thing about nuclear hawks. Going around talking about how wonderful and perfect it is when there even actually have a going concern much less a successful one -- while hand-waving and going "bah" about all the massive failures.
@@romulusnr It is a facility designed to be literally permanent (or at least 100,000 years of lifespan) so 20 years is not that long. I‘d also like to point out that Finland isn’t a rich country, and doesn’t have the money or time that major powers like the US do. You seem to be anti-nuclear for no particular reason other than „nuclear bad“. For example: what massive failures? Chernobyl? The facility that was built with low safety standards and had very poor operating procedures? And how a full meltdown can’t even occur? You also seem to majorly misunderstand how much high radioactive waste nuclear produces, as it’s barely any.
@@K-o-R or use better alternatives if possible, such as hydro, wind & solar. This is what we use here in Quebec. Nuclear is good but you still have to deal with nuclear waste, so if you're lucky enough to have access to these other 3 power sources, you should use them.
It would take 19 yrs for Japan to recycle 10k tons of solar panels vs France recycles almost 2k tons of nuclear waste every year. Which is worse? And you have to deal with nuclear waste from hospitals so I still dont see the problem unless youre a luddite but why would you support solar then.
@@tcg1_qcAnd how are those methods better? Solar cells are not efficient enough to compete with nuclear and wind is not effective in many different ways. I’m not saying that solar, hydro, and in some situations wind are bad options, but they certainly can’t replace nuclear. Nuclear plants produce very little waste that cannot be repurposed.
@@bredcubed1161 That's why I said if possible. Hydro can definitely compare to nuclear, pretty much all of our electricity here comes from hydro. As for wind & solar, they can also make tons of power if you have enough of them. Of course you need a large empty space, which we have plenty of here in Canada
To estimate the time to complete a project, calculate the time needed, multiply by two, and change to a higher unit. That's why it takes 7 years to do a 3.5 month project.
An explosion occurred at 1:30 am inside an urban heating plant (500 MW, 6,000 m² floor area), with the energy dissipated into the ground estimated at the equivalent of a 50 kg charge of TNT. Operational since 1987, this heating unit comprised 5 boilers (2 coal-fired, 2 fuelled by a coal/gas mix, and 1 gas-powered). During the previous shift, several attempts to start up one of the mixed fuel boilers failed. Unable to restart the equipment and with the gas inlet pressure gauges indicating zero pressure, the foreman of the night shift ordered opening both valves a quarter turn towards shutting off the gas inlet on the main circuit. Since the indicated pressure remained at zero, the shift foreman requested the boiler technician to open a blowout preventer and then a butterfly control valve to feed the mixed fuel boiler with gas. This operation resulted in a major gas leak. A gas boiler underwent emergency shutdown, and 2 technicians exited the unit to cut the general gas supply at the regulator station, 110 m from the building, when the explosion happened. @@piercexlr878
I mean yes, when that is the case. But nuclear reactors do reach the end of their lifespan and have to be shut down for safety reasons But whatever Germany has going on is f***ing wild
Today's Fact: In 2013, a woman from Utah gave birth to her own grandchildren as a surrogate for her daughter, who could not carry a child due to cancer.
Imagine your mother also being your aunt, but your mother also being your grandmother, and you being technically your mother's brother makes yourself your own uncle. Your children will be your cousins, your wife would be your aunt, your siblings (at least ones that weren't surrogates from your (grand?)mother) are your nephews/nieces.
I can't wait until the world turns into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and the only surviving informational videos are from HAI. As future humans worship Sam as a god of knowledge. As they patiently wait for the messiah Amy to arrive, and asking her to give them guidance.
One slight issue with the video. When handing entombment, you say that the reactor will be filled with cement. This is not correct, it gets filled with concrete. Concrete contains cement but also has aggregates, air, admixtures and most importantly, water.
Oh hey I get to be someone that makes a correction for once. Daiichi is pronounced dai ichi. It isn't a long i sound but rather two i sounds. And it means number 1 btw, which I always found weird wasn't translated in news stories.
Haha of course, just as expected a bunch of people probably went right to the comments to cry about someone dare saying dear leader was bad and probably left.
I am So Delighted that you did not take venture capital $ at nebula. It makes me feel good to be a member. I did know know you were there, I've just followed you on that platform.
