Years ago there was a detected increase in the radiation level near Huntsville AL where there is a nuclear power plant. It ended up originating from the ash pile from the coal-fired power plant up river.
As a worker, licensed fuel handler, and trainer at the Ft. St. Vrain HTGR in Colorado for 23 years, I still believe that nuclear is still the best way to go. Our main fuel was Thorium 232 (with a small amount of U 235 for startup) which was converted to U 233, totally planned for spent fuel reprocessing and re-use until the politicians cut funding for it. There are billions of dollars of perfectly good re-usable fuel sitting in Idaho and at the FSV ISFSI. Yes, FSV had some problems with mostly the conventional side of the plant, but it proved that 3rd and now 4th generation plants should be built using the best of the methods and technologies of all nukes.
I wish I had your experience, Philip. HTGRs may end up being the way to go, but molten salt reactors also may be the right solution. Molten salt reactors allow for the high power swings required to work with wind and solar, without problem of xenon buildup, and without the issues associated with high pressure systems. It could be HTGRs or molten salt reactors are the right solution.
It was the politicians that started all this. Then we find out issues like tellurium embrittlement and normalized discharges that release emissions not talked about by people such as yourself that have made salaries based on this science. The inverse square law does not apply to extended sources of radiation and absorbed dose is 1. Range (electron volt 1.602×10-19)2. Deposition through the range 3. Area of irradiation (ISL) 4. Density of the means REM RAD conversion.
@@jmac6248 There are some things on which I bitterly disagree with Bill Gates. That being said, your reply caused me to pause. I should take a person's qualities as a balance. He has done some very good things also. I have amended my reply accordingly.
@@michaelj3971 HTGRs use graphite as the moderator and while our reactors are different than the RMBK, using graphite in a nuclear reactor is the same as an RMBK and does not have the safest of track records.
I was a nuclear tech in the US Navy. When I got cold in the submarine I literally would hug the shield wall of the nuclear reactor to get warm. The reactor produces roughly 750 MW. Yet, it was perfectly safe. I did not get radiation poisoning. The reactor keeps the nuclear submarines powered and warm pretty much forever. The science is there and so is the practicality. Nuclear energy is the cleanest safest form of energy we have. If you maintain it, follow the safety guides lines and utilize common sense everything will work as needed. If that wasn't the case the Navy wouldn't put a nuclear bomb(s) in the ocean (besides the ICBMS) The research was done with extreme accuracy and with the utmost margin off error. The reactor kept me warm, powered the entire sub and gave the crew(s) everything we needed to stay as comfortable as possible on our long deployments. The sub could literally power an city. 750 MW could power about 20,000 homes. Now that's pretty insane.
the problem is in some of gov like russia is super corrupt and sometimes they cut corner. should make international law of everyone involve would be punished severely if that ever happen
750MW one sub nuclear reactor or... 750MW "renewable" power from wind generators. Thats about 800 of those wind metal giants that are only about 40% efficient in a good wind year. 800, each with 150t steel, 1500t reinforced concrete foundations, plus several dozen tons of non-recyclable composite materials, rare metals, oils, etc...
Whats funny about nuclear power is that EVERYBODY who understands how it works says its safe and it could solve our dependence on fossil fuels sooner than any other form of renewable (dont get me wrong I do support wind, solar etc), and all people who do not know how nuclear power works are worried and immediately go "ohh look what happened in Chernobyl".
It's all about following the money... Power companies would love to get their hands on nuclear power plants... because once they are up an operational... it's free money to them because the upkeep would be marginal. Where the money part comes in is, politicians are now so sold on "green" energy crap that they will never come around to seeing nuclear as a real option to solve the power problems.
@@Grantherum You mean private companies buying state owned or build state funded power plants? Otherwise it is kind of a a veeeeeeeeeeeeery slow investment. You have to put a lot of money in a nuclear plant and wait like 10 years before you start making money. However, in its full lifetime it will make a buttload of money.
Don't forget the fact many older people were literally indoctrinated with fear during the cold war, in their classrooms and in media nuclear was the big scary enemy.
It's funny because in our day and age, the go to slogan is "trust the experts" and the experts mostly agree it is safe for us in the US. Yet it is the yahoo's who dont know much about it steering the conversation
Propeller propelled trains were in development some time in last century...IIRC in Russia. I imagine a lot of people had worries about what happens when a cow gets too close to the tracks.
@@AnalystPrime In Germany. They also called it rail zeppelin. As to the cow scenario, I don't understand why people were worrying about a cow turning into ground beef prematurely
Completely agree that nuclear energy is actually a green energy. We have the technology to generate this energy very safely. France has been doing that for a few decades now.
@Morgan Allen depends how you view the cost vs life of plant. The Sth Koreans have managed to drop 4th gen cost per MW/h dramatically compared both to other 4th gen reactors, and previous generations
You'll have to excuse me for a bit while i do a weapons-grade Captain Picard-style double facepalm... You she entity lifeforces (including she entity lifeforces currently existing in XY DNA template bodies) are so badly dulled by your Personal Opinions, you're not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer. So far.
This universe is littered with civilizations, worlds that were once alive. But you she entity lifeforces (for Earth, including she entity lifeforces currently existing in XY DNA template bodies) have killed them with your... Personal Opinions. Personal Opinions that instantly and automatically replace any and all actual facts because it's your Personal Opinion that your Personal Opinions do.
He has published this lecture or other lectures like this at least four times, and I have learned something new and thoroughly enjoyed it each time. Amazing lecturer!
Pffft. You she entity lifeforces (including she entity lifeforces currently existing in XY DNA template bodies) don't process information sufficiently. You just go as far as whatever satisfies your Personal Opinions and gives you an endorphin/dopamine/whatever rush kickback. And there you stop because you're drug addicts for those rushes and nothing else matters to you except satisfying your drug addiction.
He is writing with his right hand. The image is reversed. Look at his wedding ring, last time I checked you wear your wedding ring on the left hand not the right.
@@trappervz9478 Nah I think it's more likely he's writing backwards with his left hand (even though he's right handed) and wearing his ring on the wrong hand.
Absolutely love your lectures. I would have killed to have instructors like you in school. Thank you for bringing the facts about nuclear energy to the masses. I just wish more people would understand how safe this form of energy is and how it needs to be utilized a LOT more here in the United States.
you have them now... its a propaganda piece... nothing more. Everything is great until it has a problem... all his myths are totally factual... His first BS question how much is given off... right. Guess no one who works at a plant wears anything to monitor radiation right? Radiation is also cumulative... so saying "well xyz is background" yeah we can't do anything about that... you dont want to ADD more... "Geiger counters are used to detect radioactive emissions, most commonly beta particles and gamma rays" OKay what about any others? lol...
@@mattlane2282 They wear dosimeter because there can be a small leak, a fuel pool could've dried a bit... nothing much. The other type of radiaton is Alpha radiation which can be stopped by any clothing, skin, paper, anything.
@@creativecatproductions done quite a bit of research into things and... he totally ignores fukashima... (sp) with its missing fuel rods, radioactive water being dumped into the ocean for 10 years... all the storage tanks they plan to dump... all the people who died... the fact japan has radiation meters all over the place.... that should be a HUGE example of this is slanted BS... why no talking about the most RECENT disaster? Oh cause saying the fuel rods are melting into the earth and can't be found won't sound good but saying a super old reactor failed that no one else in the world uses... sounds much better...
The cost of building a nuclear plant is high for multiple reasons: 1. The amount of litigation concerning building the plant which often stalls construction which means costs based on costs of labor and material when the plant was planned is always too low after a delay. 2. Design changes caused by regulatory changes which require redesign and modification of parts already constructed. Tearing down finished work and rebuilding it or modifying parts already constructed increase costs. 3. Regulatory changes in general which force a stop in construction and a review of existing plans. (I should have listed this as number 2. 4. Financing. There are two ways of financing this kind of major project. One is financing the borrowed money for a short time (say a year) and the state allowing you to charge your customers for the work completed so far, called work in progress funding. This results in less interest being charged, and a reduction in cost. The other is like when you buy a home, where the final cost doesn't begin to be placed in the customer's cost until the work is done. Remember if you buy a home on a thirty year mortgage, you will end up paying somewhere between double and triple the homes price. Think of it this way, a plant is added to the rate base until it is completed. With interest, the price is now 4.5 Billion. Work in progress funding would have cost much less; but the banks and finance houses making the loans would not have made as much. In a Illinois, the Braidwood Nuclear Station cost roughly 4.5 Bilion because no costs were allowed until it was finished. This provided a rate shock which the regulator alleviated by not allowing the full cost in the rate base which caused other issues. Another aside, with the best solar production at the time and allowing for conditions as good as the US southwestern desert areas, it would have taken 72 square miles of Illinois farm lands to equal one of the two units. Commonwealth Edison had 12 units at the time with six this size and 6 somewhat smaller with the 13th having been retired. Two of the 12 were later retired when the cost of modernizing them to the latest safety standards would have exceeded the profit of their remaining operational lifetime. Think of how much foid that would have been lost to replace the nuclear generation. I haven't even discussed the potential cost of maintenance or potential affects of the tornadoes that may hit many areas of Illinois. Yes, I did work for Edison's nuclear division.
Nice story. Its pretty much irrelevant considering the levelized cost of nuclear is 3-5x higher then solar and wind regardless of the reasons and even when state funded its still unreasonably expensive. On top of that the time to build is 6.5-10+ years which means no revenue or return on investment for close to a decade which also means an extra decade of co2 production before the reactor comes on line. Finally there isnt enough material, expert contractors or storage for waste to concurrently build enough reactors to replace fossil fuels within a reasonable timeframe, 2050ish. All these reasons make them a bad idea to bank on for replacing fossil fuels and curbing co2.
@@bertthompson4748 the cost of energy storage to fix the duck curve on supply vs demand will alter the final cost per watt. Probably still in favor of solar, vs nuclear. But I personally still favor rapidly constructed plants powered by small modular reactors to be part of our energy mix. To keep us going overnight.
@@foxrings you mean the reactors that we wont have proof of concept built until 2030 at least? The ones that can power about 60k homes? The one that will cost billions to build? Sounds..... illogical
@@foxrings yeah, luckily thats all been tested and works out cheaper still. For instance the tesla battery that Australia build took 4yrs to completely pay off, stabilised the grid and has since been expanded. Thats just one example.
Would love to see a comparison of kilowatts produced per acre for nuclear, wind, solar and hydropower. How many acres of solar panels or windmill farm does it take to produce the power of a small nuclear plant? How much animal and human habitat is made unavailable?
I wish everyone was trained like common knowledge basic nuclear care as in every household has there own mini reactors for heating and everything. Would work greatly in colder environments like canada(🤮) or alaska
see my comment on the Submarine tech comment. 800:1 for wind, only taking account for power produced. Area, well, i'd say by this order: nuclear, gas, coal, biomass, geothermal, wind, solar. Hydropower does produce quite a lot of power, lasts many decades and is almost always available, however, the thousands of sqm of environment impact is almost never taken into consideration. Solar has even lower efficiency than wind. Besides hydro, both wind and solar dont produce when demand is high but when nature allows it. And there is no storage (technically, some dams can use excess renewable power to pump to increase water level for later usage, but that is extremely inefficient, lots of energy lost in mechanical waste, heat, transforming, etc). Storage in batteries, is very very rare and only lasts few minutes - used mainly as backup while traditional generation is powered on (coal, gas, diesel).
As someone who lives just outside of Boulder, Colorado- I cannot get over the irony because much of the naturalist/hippy movement out here are opposed to nuclear power yet bathe in all this natural radiation.
You’ve got “naturalist/hippies” on one side with their wishful thinking, but on the other side we have people who pretend climate change is a hoax, and they want every power plant to be coal fired lmao. Wonder which side is worse?
@@Azerkeux Hi Damian, firstly apologies not having the time to reply to your comment as personal circumstances I’m afraid aren’t good, a bit off the old age has laid its hand on me and my good wife. Well, hmm, how to start!. It’s always difficult to convey in a few lines on social media on what would come across in real life conversation between friends as an understanding of subject matter and a wee joke. I was simply commenting on the succinctness of your comment, a lovely humorous observation on the subject matter. I was involved in the nuclear industry, fusion and fission for over thirty years as an engineer, then manager. Something I loved, I was one of the first people who helped introduce initially safe systems of work based on the NASA principle of risk assessment, introducing it throughout the UK nuclear industry to change attitudes in the workforce that inclusiveness was the way forward. So I hope you take this comment as an appreciation of your wit and not of discourse. My regards, Jack.
This video looks like it's from an educational VHS a teacher would show in the early 2000's when they were too hung over to do more than get the big tv on the cart from the library. Those were my favorite days in class.
Sounds like my highschool. It was in a small, very white, fairly christian town. The kids hardly got up to anything other than smoking in a parking lot or loitering outside the seven-eleven, but the teachers were all freaks and nutcases. They were as eccentric as the cast of M*A*S*H but they were real people.
Unfortunately, I never got the chance to go to a proper high school/ university. How I wish I would have been able to go to one of your classes, energy professor! Your YT videos are a joy to watch and I have learned a great deal from them. The way you teach shows that you are genuinely interested in sharing knowledge and you do so with zest and humour. Even when delving into the Chernobyl disaster you managed to make me crack a smile on more than one occasion during this rather serious topic. Hope to see a lot more of your videos!
Yeah, I blew it. I am actually fluent in German (exchange student in my youth). I thought it might have been Dutch -- but in the moment I just blurted out the first foreign language that came to mind!
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 Wait, you're actually a human, prone to errors, just like the rest of us?! I am shocked! (Well, not _that_ shocked) A question: I am under the impression that ideas currently exist for ways to actually utilize high level wastes in a different kind of reactor - is that still science fiction, or have any strides been taken along that route yet?
At about 21:40, in the discussion of the batteries, the DC power system is not designed to run the cooling pumps. There are small support pumps like the RCIC condenser vacuum pumps that can be powered by the batteries, but the batteries mostly provide control power for critical systems. A reference for this is "Part 6 of 8 - GE Technology Systems Manual (R-304B)" available on the NRC website.
The greatest compliment I guess one can give to a teacher professor or even a coach....I wasnt one of your students. but I wish I was. You make an imminently difficult to understand subject very understandable. Thats doing your job. Bravo!!!!!
Thank you! This is exactly what i need to show those who a) still believe the myths about nuclear, and b) still believe we have any alternative that does not involve nuclear power.
There isn't a thing you can say to convince somebody who believes in the myths about nuclear power. The only thing you can do is keep them out of "the loop" by not letting them vote on things that pertain to it.
I know that now. Thank you. Sorry I blew that -- and I should have known since I am somewhat fluent in German having been an exchange student there (45 years ago). I think it was the first thing that came to mind.
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 As a german myself, I forgive you, I wish this video were translated and played on every german television network once a day for a month. The anti-nuclear hatred here is ridiculous :-/
@@hothoploink1509 Yeah and nuclear plants were turned off in recent years in germany while facing climate crisis in the future and it's weird... politicans ruining things again.
I've moved from somewhat skeptical on nuclear power to an enthusiast based largely on the economic and scientific explanations provided on this channel. It's an unusual mix of technical detail combined with effective explanation. I also know which type of nuclear radiation to sit on...
Why? The Levelized Cost of Energy from groups like LAZARDS shows nuclear is 3-5x more expensive then renewables and large renewables can be built in 18 months come on in stages while nuclear averages 7.5yrs and can take 13 like in france. He never actually compares the economics of nuclear and renewables.
@@bertthompson4748 The analysis did not take into account the fact that to be useful, solar and wind energy require storage. Someday, it may be possible to do storage cheaply, but with current technology, Very Expensive. Right now, we build gas plants to cover the capacity, as this is the cheapest way ($151 - $198, according to LAZARDS). France nuclearized the whole country in 15 years, if US decided to nuclearize, no technical reason it couldn't do the same.
I don't think this professor has ever thought about what happens in nuclear reactors. I was a nuclear reactor operator on a US submarine. This professor states facts and conclusions but in real life, what he says does not tie together, he simply ignores too much and draws the conclusions he wants. Fukushima happened but he makes it sound like it was no big deal. A truly responsible look at nuclear power would not just gloss that over.
@@greg5023 its the potentiality right. Theres no other power source that has the potential to make large areas uninhabitable, even if its only a minor chance.
This channel and these lectures are brilliant. I am no means an engineer, but still I get the hang of the nuclear basics to be used in environmental activism. Thank you Prof Ruzic!
My dad was an Army Public Affairs Officer stationed in Germany in the 80s. A nuclear missile was being transported, when it broke free of its truck, and rolled through a sleepy German village (no one hurt). It took WEEKS for his team to get everyone to understand that: A) nuclear missiles can't explode rolling into barns. B) nuclear missiles don't radiate with the power of a main sequence star C) NATO regulations don't allow for nuclear missiles to travel with the warheads attached (or in the same convoy, or even within the same week as the missile) Didn't help that "The Day After" had just aired.
This was a brilliant presentation. Modern lifestyles are dependent on vast quantities of energy which can only be supplied by fossil and nuclear. If the U.S. nuclear industry were allowed to advance and innovate by building new plants, the costs would go down proportionally. Fear and ignorance have hurt us as much as blind idealism.
The remarkable information you provide to your viewers needs to be applauded. I sincerely appreciate your effort to expand your viewers knowledge. A sincere thank you!
So timely. At 4am this morning I was on a concall that involved 3 North African Nations. One already has a functioning 2,500 hectares (6,178 acres) Solar power plant, and in the process of completing another. The 3 are expecting to construct 17 - 10,000 hectare solar plants with a capacity of 22 GW over the next 20 years. In Addition, they are seeking to build between 3 and 5 Pebble bed, sodium-cooled Nuclear power plants producing 2.5GW. Plus several desalination plants whos main function is _Not to produce potable water_ (although that is needed), but to produce sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid from the brine waste materials. The *business model* is to sell Europe 0.6 TW of clean energy annually and other derived chemicals. It struck me that "clean(er) energy production" is a _political issue,_ not a science issue. This could only be achieved by Nations that are not fully democratic. I can't imagine this ever being accomplished in the U.S. where 30% of the voting public believes in crazy conspiracy theories.
I hope this didn’t just come to you as bolt out of the blue? No sic a thing as (green) energy, it’s another fairy tale to help .children sleep in their beds at night all snug and tight, well you wouldn’t want to tell them that theirs a minus 40 snow storm coming and mums popping out for a new duvet and some candles, just in case?
@Aditya Chavarkar Hi Aditya, apologies for taking so long to reply to your comment, I’ve been ill and in and out of hospital along with my good lady, so things haven’t been good recently. How to reply to your query without writing war and peace is a challenge due to what has become the political nature of the subject matter. I’ll start with my background as an engineer whose training starts in the mid sixties. I view energy as work, converting joules, kilowatts into power factors from whatever substance or source they come from and their input and output. Input and output explanation, the easiest way I can put it is a microwave, say uses 2.5 kWh input to produce 800/900 watts at the output, a terrible loss yet they are everywhere, why use such useless equipment? Why I say it’s a fairytale is due the nature of the beast, it’s essentially trying to convert low energy into high energy and this is no easy task or we wouldn’t have refineries, power stations etc as mankind always takes the easiest and cheapest route, “for free” is the golden goose of all entrepreneurs, engineers, politicians and charlatans. “Green energy” is now the “golden goose”, the honeypot of endless money for companies to make fortunes and produce very little, much like “quality” from the sixties and seventies, you should read, “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance'' for reference to that point. Aspects of say these windmills, for them to be of any use, it’s the old chestnut, “economies of scale” and to build bigger and, hmm, better, they require child slave labour in Africa to supply the exotic metals they require to function. Solar panels, difficult to manufacture and to decommission in a friendly environmental manner, also only China really makes them and they have an enormous environmental problem without going into detail. To try to answer your point re hydro, dams are a way of producing energy in a reliable manner, however they have at times terrible environmental consequences, take what happened due to the dam in Afghanistan in the sixties and you’ll have an understanding why it’s in continuous war and now in Africa nations are disputing the right to dam and it may lead to war. Fresh water is a scant resource and wars will take place in the future as weather patterns change. I followed the Italian physicist who did the maths for the solar panels and salt/sodium reactor to steam conversion plant in North Africa which has now become a reality, if it wasn’t for his perseverance the project wouldn’t have happened, it took terrible personal toll on him and exhausted him also made him ill. That is a real success in energy production but what do you do at night when you want twenty megawatts to run your steel plant or light your city or cook? Please don’t view me as a climate skeptic or just a denier of a different way forward, from where I’m writing this, there would have been a mile of ice above my head twenty thousand years ago. The climate is the only constant which is changing from the last ice age, sure the planet is warming, however, is it for the good, or bad? Mankind would always seem to need a bogie man to scare us, it's disgraceful the way Greta is manipulated, after all she is a child and the way companies are abusing her is shameful along with politicians. War and peace, apologies Aditya, I wish we could talk instead of trying to write like this. In Scottish Gaelic, Slainte Mhath to you, keep safe.
There is a level of confusion with half lives and safety. It's the shorter lived isotopes that are the most dangerous. They're decaying fast and thus are highly radioactive. U238 has a half life of over four billion years. Which initially sounds alarming but in reality this means it's decaying inredibly slowly and thus is only very slightly radioactive. U238 is frequently used as a radiation shield!!
@@lsq7833 I think there is a political agenda to maintain fear of the word 'nuclear' in general. Without fear, nuclear weapons are useless. There is not a lot of effort made to explain to people that power reactors are not fissile bombs.
Dr. Ruzic, thanks for this video and congratulations on using the pandemic time-off to improve fitness and weight-loss! I have been on a similar path of self-development. Here's a fact that i have been using in my Quora responses - the Annual World Energy Consumption (AWEC) is equivalent to the mass-to-energy conversion, via E=mc^2, of less than 7,000 kg. That is so small! Nuclear energy plants are our most efficient means of converting mass to energy. Good old Uranium fission can take us more than 500 years into the future of human energy requirements without greenhouse gases. Good on you to champion this unpopular-in-the-US solution to our energy needs!
I want to add a note regarding the fission part from 12:20 to 16:00. After the water which acts as a moderator is evaporated the main chain reaction will stop because Uranium 235 will not undergo nuclear fission anymore. However, the splitting process also creates many elements that continue to decay (even without water) according to their corresponding decay chain. I would have to look up the exact data. As far as I remember the lectures I took, this means that something like 10% of the nominal power still has to be cooled for a period of hours or days after the main fission reaction is stopped. Therefore a risk for a meltdown still remains. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Technically the "how much radioactivity" A and B. Largely the plants are made from materials that produce less radiation than the surrounding land and for the most part - outside California for some reason - even in failure and meltdown the major events have released less than background.
@Illinois EnergyProf Just an idea: I was watching a UA-cam video about the Kola Borehole. It is the deepest borehole at 12Km. I understood that one of the problems drilling deeper was that the consistency of the basalt changed from solid to something that was more viscus . But for the nuclear waste that might be a solution. Since the most of the long lived nuclear waste products are trans uranium's, the specific weight of these waste products should be larger than the basalt and other materials in the hole. Hence if we would put the waste products at such depths, gravity would slowly pull down the waste products deeper and deeper. Not sure how fast that would go but even if that is a 1Km per year that would be still be good. I would guess that other problems with for instance water are less of a problem because the viscus rock should also replace water. For the costs, drilling such deep holes was quite expensive, but also because it was never done before and thus the technology invented. Also there might be spots where the crust is much less deep and those conditions are not that deep down. Not sure if this would be an option or if someone already took a look at this?
Interesting but completely impractical. The cost to drill that deep is very high. Also remember the hole is barely 1 foot in diameter. That can't hold more than a ton or so of waste. The better solutions are like what th4 Swedes are doing: dig down and out under the continental shelf a mile or two. Then stuff it full of glass-ified waste. Digging that kind of mine is simple and relatively cheap. It's also under a mile or more of ocean, in a place that it's extraordinarily unlikely anyone will ever accidentally disturb. And it's good for 100k or more years. Well beyond when it's dangerous to anything.
@@erikanybody4298 Interesting that you say its impractical. Its never been done and there might be several ways of doing this. Using the Kola Borhole for this might be expensive. However, one of the big costs was that they had to invent everything. A second hole is much cheaper. Additionally, there are probably other locations in the world where these conditions can be found much closer to the surface. That would also reduce the costs a lot. For the amount of material you can store in there, that depends very much on the viscosity of the rock. If if would sink at 1 km per hour (very slow walking speed) than in one hour 0,3^2xpix1000- 282m3 waste could be put in there. You continue to put more waste in there as it all sinks away. For the SFL (the long term storage you mentioned in Sweden ), they indeed store nuclear waste in 500m deep bedrock. That is a nice option, but the problem is that you do not know what will happen in 100.000 year timescales. This is made worse by the interaction with ground water. If something would leak, it could contaminate the ground water might circulate to other places.
@@erikanybody4298 I prefer the way the Americans are placing their deep repository. Just dig some holes into a salt deposit: salt is ductile meaning that holes are closing by rock pressure after a while. And it is a good thermal conductor, which is helpful when storing highly radioactive waste to avoid hot spots. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant And if somebody mentions that salt is soluble in water, ask why salt domes have not been washed away in the last dozen of millions of years.
I'd really love you to do a vid on molten salt fueled reactors. Specifically, the possibility that bad chemistry can cause the fissile material to settle out of suspension and cause unintended criticality. This seems to be an issue that molten salt proponents fail to mention when they say these things will be "walk away safe". If the operators let the chemistry get away from them the safety could be out the window?
You are indeed talking bad chemistry. First, if you choose the correct salts, the fissile material (likely as uranium/plutonium fluorides/chlorides) are IN SOLUTION (a chemical phenomena), not in suspension (a physical phenomena, not chemistry). Secondly, you do have to manage the reduction/oxidation capabilities of the salt (typically by adding extra fluorides/chlorides or lithium/sodium), but that management is on the order of days/weeks, not microseconds. The solution won't suddenly tip its oxidation state - certainly not in the time it takes the salt to cool and solidify in a shutdown - and once the salt is solid, then the mobility needed for a hot-spot to occur has disappeared.
@@factnotfiction5915 I'm not sure if this is what they were getting at, but you can have noble metal fission products precipitate out of solution depending on chemistry and temperature. That was an issue they noted with the MSRE, with noble metals, over time, precipitating and plating onto the inside of the heat exchanger towards the end. This was an issue Oak Ridge had planned on addressing with the MSRE2, but it wasn't a major issue though. Just one of the reasons why they needed to develop processes and methods of tracking chemistry in the reactor on a more real time basis. That's something we can do today though.
I think a good point about Fukushima is that there's no such thing as the Onagawa disaster, even though the nuclear plant at Onagawa was closer to the epicenter of the earthquake and got hit with the largest part of the tsunami.
My first civilian job after leaving the army was the south Texas nuclear project. That was in 1986, we still generate power from those two reactors. I truly wish people would wake up and build several more in each state.
People around the world have constantly increased their consumption of energy and endlessly hope and beg to find a solution yet they fear the only solution which would render the production and use of electricity a moot point while doing it in a much safer fashion than anything currently in use today including wind and solar. Great video, anyone actually interested in clean energy should watch it. Also, this man's ability to write backwards with his left hand is amazing beyond words.
psst... mirrors ;) You can't see it in this video, but in any that are set up like this that have any sort of writing anywhere on the shirt or clothing it's instantly noticeable. He's writing 'forwards' to himself and the image is just reversed :) (I thought the exact same thing until someone explained it to me!)
I want to save this video to show people because that's what you always hear when people object to it that the waste is so bad. What they don't talk about with wind and solar is all the environmental damage getting the stuff out to make the panel and the blade and how is not profitable to recycle so they just throw the stuff in landfills after 15 or 25 years average. So this is going to be a very valuable video. Thank you for doing that.
Thanks professor Ruzic. The earlier people and politicians realise that Nuclear is actually the safest and cleanest way to go is better. Instead of wasting money on wind and solar, messing up landscapes, we should have invested in Nuclear like France did. And be independent of undemocratic countries that live off money they get from selling fossil fuels.
Amen, Ephel! Preach!! I work in utilities and convincing the general public of this is so incredibly hard. Hell, we have a lot of people who come into the office thinking of all the things this awesome professor is mentioning and we have to show them the impirical evidence hidden from them in college. David Ruzic is a godsend and his word needs to be spread far and wide!.
@@satanofficial3902 If look at the actual figures, average coal / gas plant emits far more chemicals that the Nuclear. Yes, the wastes have to be stored, but so do millions of tonns of other stuff that we currently bury, dump in the ocean etc. If careless soviets hadn't build those pathetic reactors I guess there wouldn't have been any doubts about which way to go in producing energy.
Solar is a good tertiary method due to its limitations on efficiency, location, and WX (weather). I have considered putting solar panels on my home to offset grid use, still working out the details to ensure its financially solid as its a long term fixed investment. That being said, nuclear works just about everywhere, and you can scale the shit out of it. Now once we start talking about Gen 4 nuclear, we can start talking about taking our current waste fuels and burning them again, and they are meltdown proof designs. If Fukushima was even a Gen 3 much less a Gen 4 and it got hit directly by a Magnitude 12 earthquake and a 60 foot tsunami, it likely would have had no radiation release.
THANK YOU SIR! I was aware of most of these facts by picking them up over the years. It's fantastic to have them all in one lecture. Michael Crichton's talk on complex systems covers the hysteria and propaganda that came from Chernobyl. I highly recommend it.
Fantastic lectures from Illinois EnergyProf, all of them. Complex matter explained so that really everybody can understand it: it takes great expertise to do so...
About the whole “no radiation at the plant”. Inside the reactor to the mods built under the chamber, there is radioactivity, but it’s not lethal and can be treated with a standard scrub. Once you were exposed to 25mil you were done for the year.
I'm not sure what the hell "the mods built under the chamber" is supposed to mean, but there is certainly radiation inside the reactor, very VERY lethal radiation, which is why nobody works inside the reactor (also, it's full of metal and water and steam, so there isn't any room). In the parts of the power plant where people work, there isn't any radiation. It all contained by the reactor vessel and the containment building, and the containment building is sealed off and no-one is allowed to go in while the reactor is running.
Radioactivity is not what to talk about. It is radiation. Radiation cannot be remove unless you remove the source of the radiation. Contamination is when a radioactive material is on the surface of an object. Contamination can be removed.
17:25 "but Fukushima!" Yeah, those buildings exploded because they were giant pressure cookers and blew up because of that, not because of nuclear fission. This talk makes me feel so amazing. Growing up with a nuclear engine technician as a father really opened my eyes to the myths and propaganda surrounding it and it's nice to see it's finally making it's way into the real world
Still, there has to be a certain amount of consideration given to the geographic area where a nuclear reactor is being placed. Japan has something stupid like 49 reactors despite being on a tectonic plate that's moving and being subject to tsunami-waves, earthquakes and tornados. Reevaluating nuclear power and the safety of it does not automatically give the world carte blanche to build it wherever without the know-how to run it and It's not something that's risk free.
@@Teutathis yea and the most retarded thing ever is Germany (very many tsunamis and earthquakes) shutting down all their nuclear plants because of Fukushima and replacing them with coal or power imported from coal
@@reahs4815 Well, that's the point isn't it? Countries where the factors line up and justify the use of nuclear power should utilize it because when nuclear power is an option It also tends to be the best one. Today's debate climate is sadly so polarized that either something is entirely good or entirely bad which means that we've taken a step away from reality as reality is almost exclusively a shade of grey.
Hi, thanks for providing all that info. I might just have a slight correction: The subtitles in that clip at 9:32 are NOT German. Looks more like Danish/Swedish/Norwegian
The point about wind and solar progression slowing down (at about minute 3:00) is IMHO unfairly stated.. Trying to compare the change over 13 years vs the change over 5 years without expressing both as an annual rate obfuscates things. For solar: A factor of 15 change over 13 years is an increase of 23% per year. A factor of 2.5 change over 5 years is an increase of 20% per year. For wind: 10x over 13 years is about 19% per year. 1.5x over 5 years is 8% per year. So IMHO solar growth has not slowed down significantly (in the sense that with rounding of output and dates 23% looks lots like 20%...but if we were absolutely certain about the 23% and the 20% numbers then through the magic of compound interest the two paths would be vastly different after 10 years) but wind growth clearly has slowed down by quite a bit. -Jon
You explain crystal clear that Nuclear fission is a safe, very clean way to generate energy continuously without depending on cloudless or windless days. Sadly the green people have gone more than slightly mad.
Not all of them..... I am a Marine Biologist and have been for over three decades. Despite that I do fully support Nuclear power. While renewables are great, they are simply not reliable enough at this time, especially without advances in storage technologies so that excess generated when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining can be stored and then released when the energy production drops because, you know, its a still night! Saying that though, having worked in Conservation Biology for a while turns you into a pragmatist. Trying to find ways to conserve a species whilst impacting the human population as little as possible kind of forces you to be so!
@@dannywilliamson3340 Nixon did his part too with the prompt shutdown of the MSRE. The color doesn't matter, politicians should not make scientific decisions if they have no qualification, at least that was what I thought, until I heard that Angela Merkel has a Phd. in physics so.... Im not even sure that is enough.
Reprocessing is the dirtiest and most expensive nuclear process. It creates more high-level waste than fuel it reprocesses, exposes workers and the environment to high levels of radioactivity and no one wants to buy the reprocessed fuel. It is cheaper to mine and process ore...or better yet go to another energy source. When you do reprocess waste and re-use it as fuel, what do you end up with? More fission by-products that have to be isolated from all life for longer than mankind has been in existence. No one is re-reprocessing spent fuel and no one is disposing of radioactive waste (20-30 tons of high-level waste and 50-70 tons of low-level waste generated per reactor annually and all those ore tailings and contaminated soil and water) Oh, and the most polluted nuclear sites in the world are all waste reprocessing facilities. I have a better idea. Let's quit using nuclear energy and go with cleaner, safer and easier to deploy renewables, which are 4-10 times cheaper than nuclear. And renewables do not have a weapons proliferation problem. Worldwide, nuclear is in stark decline and renewables are rising. Fusion has been 20 years away for the last 40 years with no end in sight and still throwing good money after bad. Big finance is pouring vast sums of money into renewable investments. Last year, renewables overtook fossil fuels as the largest portion of the EU's energy production. Renewables was second only to natural gas in the U.S. India is building the world's largest energy complex in Gujarat with wind and solar. Australia is building the largest solar farm. BP is investing 10 billion pounds in wind farms in Aberdeen. Nuclear reactors are shutting down all over the world and having massive cost overruns, construction delays (the gangs that cannot weld or pour concrete straight) and shutdowns at new reactors at Hinkley Point, Flamanville, Vogtle, Taishan, and Olkiluoto. Given the rapid advances in renewable energy, grid and storage technology and the absolute urgency of the climate change crisis, we can't continue to waste time and money on 20th century fossil fuel and nuclear technology with all their liabilities. P.S. The entire nuclear fuel chain from mining to reactor construction and decommissioning (if it ever happens) to waste burial (if it ever happens) is highly carbon-emitting and has a negative impact on climate change, the health and continued existence of every living being and the environment. We don't need no steenkin' nukies.
All my electricity comes from nuclear reactors. I don't give it a second thought. If the public wants EVs, nuclear energy is how much of that infrastructure will need to be supplied.
@@reahs4815 Yeah sure... I love radiation in the morning rofl... plant food vs radiation... Shit i exhale vs radiation... Yeah nuclear is perfect you go live by it
@@mattlane2282 Yea I would live next to a nuclear plant to get 100% clean always on power. also, there is 0 absolute none radiation making it out of the nuclear plant let a lone the containment building Bet you would not like to live next to a wind farm or a solar field ua-cam.com/video/TRL7o2kPqw0/v-deo.html
Prof. David Ruzic has such content and cadence in his speech that I just want to listen. I am a student who was inspired to work with nuclear materials thanks to the professor. I hope to one day meet you Professor and share a spirited talk about nuclear materials.
Actually, with Fukushima they did know it was possibility, and they were repeatedly warned about it, but they refused to admit their mistake and make the expensive modifications for such an extremely unlikely event, even when the whole country was waiting for the next big one
Maybe the decay heat could power a Sterling engine that powers the cooling pumps... I wonder if it would be enough to power a self sufficient system for cooling the spent fuel pools and/or the reactor? (assuming you've got a heat sink like sea water)
"Nuclear waste are not Green Goo that turn turtle into Ninja warrior" can we use it as a citation ? Always a pleasure to watch you and I will recommend the video for "cyberpunk after nuclear reactor blow-up believers".
This guys full of shit... how come no talk about japan? Oh right cause the cores are LOST... and it has radiation all over the ocean... all over the area... tons of people died from it.. "safe"
@@nt78stonewobble And is wrong..... rofl... i did not watch the entire thing cause it's BS... I did some nuclear reactor stuff in school so tell me all about how I am wrong... nothing EVER leaks right? Put it in your backyard with radioactive leaks... enjoy your cancer...
@@mattlane2282 "And is wrong..... rofl... i did not watch the entire thing cause it's BS... I did some nuclear reactor stuff in school so tell me all about how I am wrong... nothing EVER leaks right? Put it in your backyard with radioactive leaks... enjoy your cancer..." Under normal operation little to nothing leaks. You also said that tons of people died in japan from nuclear power. That's not true...
Just a suggestion, could you do an episode on thorium molten salt reactors? They're not pressurized, they produce xenon for interstellar space travel for NASA, molybdenum 99 for cancer diagnostics therapies and research. The excess he could be used for water desalinization and petroleum distillate manufacturing. We need diesel fuel right now, and Diablo Canyon California could use the water.
Dude... I want to have your baby. I've been yammering about LFTR for years and everyone just looks at me like I have antlers growing out of my forehead.
@@throwaway692 Only in certain kinds of MSR's. Used fuel rods can't be used in a LFTR, which is a thermal spectrum reactor. Used fuel rods containing unburnt fuel as well as a small percentage of transuranics can only be burned in a fast-spectrum reactor. Elysium Technologies and TerraPower both have MSR fast spectrum reactors which could burn used fuel rods, but fast-spectrum reactors are inherent proliferation risks. LFTR's aren't though, for a couple reasons (only one of which is the U-232 issue).
@@randallgoldapp9510 I suppose you're talking about either Elysium's or TerraPower's reactors? If so, that's true, I'm afraid that's not actually the case, as only both of those reactors shouldn't be producing excess fissile material because they are stated to be operated as burners, with the operators only feeding them enough material to maintain criticality. My point is that this is an operational choice. There is nothing intrinsic about those reactors preventing an operator from changing their mind at some point down the line and start feeding more material into the reactor than just what's necessary to maintain criticality. This is simply the unavoidable consequence of the high breeding ratio of Pu-239 in the fast spectrum. It's actually also one of the benefits of fast spectrum reactors like Elysium's vs. thermal spectrum reactors like Oak Ridge's LFTR. The LFTR has VERY low breeding ratios, 1.05 to 1.07, meaning it consumes almost all the fuel that it produces in an endless cycle. That's great in terms of efficiency, but if you want to start a second reactor, it kind of sucks because it's going to take your first reactor between 17 and 25 years to produce enough excess fissile material for you to use it to start a second reactor. Fast spectrum reactors running on the plutonium cycle, on the other hand, have very high breeding ratios, giving them the ability to produce a lot more fissile material than what they consume. So your first reactor can quickly produce enough excess material for you to start a second reactor. Additionally, fast neutrons also have a very high chance of fissioning any of your transuranics in the reactor, such as Pu-239, Pu-240, Pu-241, Am-241, etc. So you're burning up all of that transuranic material, but you'll also be producing more new Pu-239 from the U-238 in the reactor. So, now imagine you've got two buckets, one full of U-238 and one full of Pu-239, Pu-240, Pu-241, etc. You're reactor will be fissioning everything in the Pu bucket, making the amount of material in that bucket go down. However, you'll also be turning material in the U-238 bucket into new Pu-239 which then gets transferred to the Pu bucket refilling it. If you make the operational choice to just feed U-238 into your reactor, over time, the relative isotopic concentration of Pu-239 in the Pu bucket will keep increasing until you have almost pure Pu-239. If you also choose to feed in more material that what is needed to just barely maintain criticality, you will cause the total volume of material in that Pu bucket to increase. This is a simple result of the fact that U-238/Pu-239 has very high breeding ratios in the fast spectrum and the fact that all transuranics generally have a high fission rate in the fast spectrum. You can't engineer that away. LFTR, on the other hand, has a borderline anemic breeding ratio, which just by itself, makes LFTR's ENCREDIBLY proliferation resistant. Then, when you tag on the whole U-232 issue, LFTR's become as close to proliferation proof as physically possible.
Rocket powered fighter jet Rocket powered semi truck Rocket powered locomotive Rocket powered rail car This video taught me you can power anything with rockets.
A video on how to make Nuclear cheaper could be good. ;) IMO, we could make nuclear cheaper and faster to build with modernized regulations and improved licensing.
Making it cheaper is 1000x more important than all the scare stories covered in this video. If it can't compete with solar / wind + storage then it's going to disappear from Earth. Very useful in space though...
@@AmusicsiteCoUk Actually,that's the one thing I'm not worry about. If we ban all the fossil fuels or we eventually run out of them, people will immediately realize that wind and solar only generate a pathetic amount of electricity. At that point, you got no choice other than building more nuclear power plants.
Let's scrap the contaiment building, the 25km² exclusion zone and the decomission fund. That ought to bring down costs, they are passively safe right, so who needs containment.
Hey Prof. Ruzic, please keep uploading, I really like your lectures and they keep me engaged on a topic I wouldn't have thought interesting until your videos. Thanks, -Student
I already watched all the other nuclear power videos, so I knew all of this already... but the guy just has such an entertaining and engaging way of presenting that I still enjoyed this vid - and it still felt like I was only watching for 15mins and not half an hour! - can't believe he only has 62K subs.... and THATS why you need to hit "subscribe"!
22:03 Fukushima Unit #2 was able to maintain water to the reactor for 3days (70) hours,using the steam driven Terry Turbine Feed water Pump. Steam baby, stick with steam. Train locomotives ran on steam with no electricity. So did unit #2. From a proud graduate of the Petersen School of Steam Engineering..lol. 500 bucks 12 week course back in the day.
"Train locomotives ran on steam with no electricity." - No. They ran on coal. You burned fuel to heat water that produced steam that ran the train. The fuel source was coal and not steam.
Nice video. Please explain scrubbers for coal plants and how low their emissions can be made to go. Also demonstrate the differences in employment numbers between types of energy. Knowledge is golden. Thank you.
Looks like you have a point to make. Why don't you make it? Not being adversarial... just asking why you want someone else to say something you seem to want to say.
@@xander395 No problem. You have my apologies if I phrased the request for information poorly. The point is simple, I was asking for information that I would find interesting. Which is why watched this video. I do not know which is better or worse. I feel the more information we have the better decisions we can make. I hope that helps you.
I've been convinced for some time that nuclear can help solve energy requirements. More so after watching this video. Well explains the reasons nuclear is safe and should be included in the production of the worlds energy needs.
I worked on all the safety and protection systems for several nuclear units, and I'd happily live on the shield building of any US nuclear plant (if only they'd allow it). People get their information from movies, TV, and highly compensated "non-profit" environmental groups. I bailed out and now work in a different technical discipline after noting how the public's lack of knowledge made my employment an uncertain proposition with regard to the long term...
I wish people were more educated. Ask anyone basic science questions, even so-called "common knowledge" like "how old is the Earth" or even "what is the radiation" and you might get surprised ;) Veritasium has a video from a few years ago where he asks about radiation on the streets and people don't know much about it although collectively they provided some semi-decent answers ;) Perhaps this is just the editing of the video or the selection bias.
Yes indeed. I really blew that. I am even fluent in German (or at least I was 45 years ago when I was an exchange student there!) I think it was just the first thing that came to mind.
thank you for this video ive been showing it to friends i know who have been worried about the new nuclear power plant going up in my state of Wyoming and its saved me a lot of arguments.
If anyone is interested in radiation related incidents, I'll throw in a plug for the channel 'Plainly Difficult', he has a bunch of mini-documentaries about various disasters, and quite a few radiation related ones. Interestingly, only a few were actually related to reactors.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk Very true. The only reactor deaths (outside of Chernobyl) I remember from that channel was an experimental Army reactor that was meant to be portable. Due to some design flaw the control rods had to be retracted the first few inches BY HAND to start the reactor. One of the poor techs ended up pinned to the ceiling by a fuel rod, the other 2 scalded by radioactive steam. It's theorized the rod was stuck and slipped as he pulled on it extracting it just to far, causing a near instantaneous runaway.
Years ago there was a detected increase in the radiation level near Huntsville AL where there is a nuclear power plant. It ended up originating from the ash pile from the coal-fired power plant up river.
Lmao
Well, coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk whaaaaat?!😳
@@Aden_III That's right, ask Mr Google that phrase if the following link gets blocked.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk 😲
"It's not going to turn turtles into ninja warriors."
Crush all my dreams, why don't you.
Well,first of all they would require a proper sensei. But maybe that goes without saying.
Wait, that was my main reason to push for more Nuclear plants in the first place!
No but it will give you cancer and tumours and destroy reproductive organs
@@hemidart7 There have been no Fukushima radiation deaths and no cancer increases since 2011.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk Prove that to me....I'm waiting.....Ahhh I see, you can't
As a worker, licensed fuel handler, and trainer at the Ft. St. Vrain HTGR in Colorado for 23 years, I still believe that nuclear is still the best way to go. Our main fuel was Thorium 232 (with a small amount of U 235 for startup) which was converted to U 233, totally planned for spent fuel reprocessing and re-use until the politicians cut funding for it. There are billions of dollars of perfectly good re-usable fuel sitting in Idaho and at the FSV ISFSI. Yes, FSV had some problems with mostly the conventional side of the plant, but it proved that 3rd and now 4th generation plants should be built using the best of the methods and technologies of all nukes.
I wish I had your experience, Philip. HTGRs may end up being the way to go, but molten salt reactors also may be the right solution. Molten salt reactors allow for the high power swings required to work with wind and solar, without problem of xenon buildup, and without the issues associated with high pressure systems. It could be HTGRs or molten salt reactors are the right solution.
Why would something lending credence to Bill Gates make you hesitant to say it?
It was the politicians that started all this. Then we find out issues like tellurium embrittlement and normalized discharges that release emissions not talked about by people such as yourself that have made salaries based on this science. The inverse square law does not apply to extended sources of radiation and absorbed dose is 1. Range (electron volt 1.602×10-19)2. Deposition through the range 3. Area of irradiation (ISL) 4. Density of the means REM RAD conversion.
@@jmac6248 There are some things on which I bitterly disagree with Bill Gates. That being said, your reply caused me to pause. I should take a person's qualities as a balance. He has done some very good things also. I have amended my reply accordingly.
@@michaelj3971 HTGRs use graphite as the moderator and while our reactors are different than the RMBK, using graphite in a nuclear reactor is the same as an RMBK and does not have the safest of track records.
I was a nuclear tech in the US Navy. When I got cold in the submarine I literally would hug the shield wall of the nuclear reactor to get warm. The reactor produces roughly 750 MW. Yet, it was perfectly safe. I did not get radiation poisoning. The reactor keeps the nuclear submarines powered and warm pretty much forever.
The science is there and so is the practicality. Nuclear energy is the cleanest safest form of energy we have. If you maintain it, follow the safety guides lines and utilize common sense everything will work as needed. If that wasn't the case the Navy wouldn't put a nuclear bomb(s) in the ocean (besides the ICBMS) The research was done with extreme accuracy and with the utmost margin off error. The reactor kept me warm, powered the entire sub and gave the crew(s) everything we needed to stay as comfortable as possible on our long deployments. The sub could literally power an city. 750 MW could power about 20,000 homes. Now that's pretty insane.
the problem is in some of gov like russia is super corrupt and sometimes they cut corner. should make international law of everyone involve would be punished severely if that ever happen
And we waste that on sub. 3 submarines equals 60,000 homes with power. Goddammn greedy Fuckers
Should I ignore the third eye?
750MW one sub nuclear reactor or... 750MW "renewable" power from wind generators.
Thats about 800 of those wind metal giants that are only about 40% efficient in a good wind year. 800, each with 150t steel, 1500t reinforced concrete foundations, plus several dozen tons of non-recyclable composite materials, rare metals, oils, etc...
Nuke on a sub? Man your life had to have sucked, i’m sorry.
Whats funny about nuclear power is that EVERYBODY who understands how it works says its safe and it could solve our dependence on fossil fuels sooner than any other form of renewable (dont get me wrong I do support wind, solar etc), and all people who do not know how nuclear power works are worried and immediately go "ohh look what happened in Chernobyl".
It's all about following the money... Power companies would love to get their hands on nuclear power plants... because once they are up an operational... it's free money to them because the upkeep would be marginal. Where the money part comes in is, politicians are now so sold on "green" energy crap that they will never come around to seeing nuclear as a real option to solve the power problems.
@@Grantherum You mean private companies buying state owned or build state funded power plants? Otherwise it is kind of a a veeeeeeeeeeeeery slow investment. You have to put a lot of money in a nuclear plant and wait like 10 years before you start making money. However, in its full lifetime it will make a buttload of money.
@@leonidasg2257 Ya... I never said it was cheap or fast... just perpetual.
Don't forget the fact many older people were literally indoctrinated with fear during the cold war, in their classrooms and in media nuclear was the big scary enemy.
It's funny because in our day and age, the go to slogan is "trust the experts" and the experts mostly agree it is safe for us in the US. Yet it is the yahoo's who dont know much about it steering the conversation
“Rocket propelled freight train”. I like the sound of that.
Send a message to Elon Musk.
Imagine being a person responsible for this kind of testing. Dream job if you ask me
Propeller propelled trains were in development some time in last century...IIRC in Russia. I imagine a lot of people had worries about what happens when a cow gets too close to the tracks.
@@AnalystPrime In Germany. They also called it rail zeppelin. As to the cow scenario, I don't understand why people were worrying about a cow turning into ground beef prematurely
@@kirillpotemkin5946 exactly because we all know that a cow can survive a regular train wreck 😆
Completely agree that nuclear energy is actually a green energy. We have the technology to generate this energy very safely. France has been doing that for a few decades now.
@Morgan Allen depends how you view the cost vs life of plant. The Sth Koreans have managed to drop 4th gen cost per MW/h dramatically compared both to other 4th gen reactors, and previous generations
@@transkryption they also had a massive issue with parts being manufactured sub par and it still cost 3x more on average then solar or winds LCOE.
Stuff and nonsense.
You'll have to excuse me for a bit while i do a weapons-grade Captain Picard-style double facepalm...
You she entity lifeforces (including she entity lifeforces currently existing in XY DNA template bodies) are so badly dulled by your Personal Opinions, you're not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer. So far.
This universe is littered with civilizations, worlds that were once alive. But you she entity lifeforces (for Earth, including she entity lifeforces currently existing in XY DNA template bodies) have killed them with your... Personal Opinions.
Personal Opinions that instantly and automatically replace any and all actual facts because it's your Personal Opinion that your Personal Opinions do.
He has published this lecture or other lectures like this at least four times, and I have learned something new and thoroughly enjoyed it each time. Amazing lecturer!
Pffft.
You she entity lifeforces (including she entity lifeforces currently existing in XY DNA template bodies) don't process information sufficiently. You just go as far as whatever satisfies your Personal Opinions and gives you an endorphin/dopamine/whatever rush kickback. And there you stop because you're drug addicts for those rushes and nothing else matters to you except satisfying your drug addiction.
The moment of the CME/carrington event gets ever closer.
Every day that goes by has become one day less to global oblivion.
@@satanofficial3902 I don’t get the joke
@@noyes8882 There is no joke, the dude is just a bigot attacking women and trans with his "I think I'm clever" manner of speech.
"German subtitles"
Good sir, I'll have you know those are Swedish!
Yes. I feel again those words. Sweedish indeed.. :)
@@eriklundquist7494 "I feel again those words". Nice swiiinglish my friend :)
A Møøse once bit my sister
@@JonathanRossRogers She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush
@@heylel1841 ï bĕg ýøůŕ pærđöń
I'm always amazed at his ability to write backwards
Which hand is he writing with?
He is writing with his right hand. The image is reversed. Look at his wedding ring, last time I checked you wear your wedding ring on the left hand not the right.
@@trappervz9478 Nah I think it's more likely he's writing backwards with his left hand (even though he's right handed) and wearing his ring on the wrong hand.
@@jasonjansen9831 I think you may be correct. What was I thinking using logic, I apologize for my insolence and beg your forgiveness.
@@jasonjansen9831 Heheheheheheheh.
"I'm David Ruzic, Illinois energy prof!" *throws explosive* "Ninja vanish!"
- old tmnt reference
!
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 as much as I like your videos professor, the intro is way too loud.
@@Danny_Boel There is no such thing as "Too loud" where explosives are concerned.
Here's some poppers I had laying around...
Clearly all of you are too young to remember Tim the Enchanter. He knew how to introduce himself.
Absolutely love your lectures. I would have killed to have instructors like you in school. Thank you for bringing the facts about nuclear energy to the masses. I just wish more people would understand how safe this form of energy is and how it needs to be utilized a LOT more here in the United States.
He understands his job (the teaching part at least) is to transfer knowledge to young people. Few professors really understand that.
The writers of the Simpsons have done so much damage in that regard
you have them now... its a propaganda piece... nothing more.
Everything is great until it has a problem... all his myths are totally factual...
His first BS question how much is given off... right. Guess no one who works at a plant wears anything to monitor radiation right?
Radiation is also cumulative... so saying "well xyz is background" yeah we can't do anything about that... you dont want to ADD more...
"Geiger counters are used to detect radioactive emissions, most commonly beta particles and gamma rays" OKay what about any others? lol...
@@mattlane2282 They wear dosimeter because there can be a small leak, a fuel pool could've dried a bit... nothing much. The other type of radiaton is Alpha radiation which can be stopped by any clothing, skin, paper, anything.
@@Gabriel-yd4bq Oh a leak so safe and clean they need meters on them... right sounds really safe and clean... thanks for making my point
I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a professor of “Energy.” What I do know, is that this guy is fascinating to listen to.
Yeah he’s great!
It sounds like a made up title a business consultant would use haha
Too bad it's all bullshit
@@mattlane2282 how do you know?
@@creativecatproductions done quite a bit of research into things and... he totally ignores fukashima... (sp) with its missing fuel rods, radioactive water being dumped into the ocean for 10 years... all the storage tanks they plan to dump... all the people who died... the fact japan has radiation meters all over the place.... that should be a HUGE example of this is slanted BS... why no talking about the most RECENT disaster? Oh cause saying the fuel rods are melting into the earth and can't be found won't sound good but saying a super old reactor failed that no one else in the world uses... sounds much better...
The cost of building a nuclear plant is high for multiple reasons:
1. The amount of litigation concerning building the plant which often stalls construction which means costs based on costs of labor and material when the plant was planned is always too low after a delay.
2. Design changes caused by regulatory changes which require redesign and modification of parts already constructed. Tearing down finished work and rebuilding it or modifying parts already constructed increase costs.
3. Regulatory changes in general which force a stop in construction and a review of existing plans. (I should have listed this as number 2.
4. Financing. There are two ways of financing this kind of major project. One is financing the borrowed money for a short time (say a year) and the state allowing you to charge your customers for the work completed so far, called work in progress funding. This results in less interest being charged, and a reduction in cost. The other is like when you buy a home, where the final cost doesn't begin to be placed in the customer's cost until the work is done. Remember if you buy a home on a thirty year mortgage, you will end up paying somewhere between double and triple the homes price. Think of it this way, a plant is added to the rate base until it is completed. With interest, the price is now 4.5 Billion. Work in progress funding would have cost much less; but the banks and finance houses making the loans would not have made as much. In a Illinois, the Braidwood Nuclear Station cost roughly 4.5 Bilion because no costs were allowed until it was finished. This provided a rate shock which the regulator alleviated by not allowing the full cost in the rate base which caused other issues. Another aside, with the best solar production at the time and allowing for conditions as good as the US southwestern desert areas, it would have taken 72 square miles of Illinois farm lands to equal one of the two units. Commonwealth Edison had 12 units at the time with six this size and 6 somewhat smaller with the 13th having been retired. Two of the 12 were later retired when the cost of modernizing them to the latest safety standards would have exceeded the profit of their remaining operational lifetime. Think of how much foid that would have been lost to replace the nuclear generation. I haven't even discussed the potential cost of maintenance or potential affects of the tornadoes that may hit many areas of Illinois. Yes, I did work for Edison's nuclear division.
Nice story.
Its pretty much irrelevant considering the levelized cost of nuclear is 3-5x higher then solar and wind regardless of the reasons and even when state funded its still unreasonably expensive.
On top of that the time to build is 6.5-10+ years which means no revenue or return on investment for close to a decade which also means an extra decade of co2 production before the reactor comes on line.
Finally there isnt enough material, expert contractors or storage for waste to concurrently build enough reactors to replace fossil fuels within a reasonable timeframe, 2050ish.
All these reasons make them a bad idea to bank on for replacing fossil fuels and curbing co2.
Small modular reactors could allow rapid construction of power plants to avoid some of those problems you discussed.
@@bertthompson4748 the cost of energy storage to fix the duck curve on supply vs demand will alter the final cost per watt. Probably still in favor of solar, vs nuclear. But I personally still favor rapidly constructed plants powered by small modular reactors to be part of our energy mix. To keep us going overnight.
@@foxrings you mean the reactors that we wont have proof of concept built until 2030 at least? The ones that can power about 60k homes? The one that will cost billions to build?
Sounds..... illogical
@@foxrings yeah, luckily thats all been tested and works out cheaper still.
For instance the tesla battery that Australia build took 4yrs to completely pay off, stabilised the grid and has since been expanded.
Thats just one example.
Would love to see a comparison of kilowatts produced per acre for nuclear, wind, solar and hydropower. How many acres of solar panels or windmill farm does it take to produce the power of a small nuclear plant? How much animal and human habitat is made unavailable?
I wish everyone was trained like common knowledge basic nuclear care as in every household has there own mini reactors for heating and everything. Would work greatly in colder environments like canada(🤮) or alaska
We can live in Antarctica!
@@rockhound3.14 Elon Musk should colonize Antarctica before Mars.
see my comment on the Submarine tech comment. 800:1 for wind, only taking account for power produced. Area, well, i'd say by this order: nuclear, gas, coal, biomass, geothermal, wind, solar.
Hydropower does produce quite a lot of power, lasts many decades and is almost always available, however, the thousands of sqm of environment impact is almost never taken into consideration. Solar has even lower efficiency than wind.
Besides hydro, both wind and solar dont produce when demand is high but when nature allows it. And there is no storage (technically, some dams can use excess renewable power to pump to increase water level for later usage, but that is extremely inefficient, lots of energy lost in mechanical waste, heat, transforming, etc). Storage in batteries, is very very rare and only lasts few minutes - used mainly as backup while traditional generation is powered on (coal, gas, diesel).
Yeah ignore the fact you need to mine and process the nuclear fuel rofl...
As someone who lives just outside of Boulder, Colorado- I cannot get over the irony because much of the naturalist/hippy movement out here are opposed to nuclear power yet bathe in all this natural radiation.
lol
But it's natural radiation, maaaaaaan
You’ve got “naturalist/hippies” on one side with their wishful thinking, but on the other side we have people who pretend climate change is a hoax, and they want every power plant to be coal fired lmao. Wonder which side is worse?
Haha ha, oh beautifully put, (bathe in natural radiation) very clever and cool.
@@Albachiel The point being that you receive more radiation just by living in the Rockies than you would by living close to a nuclear plant
@@Azerkeux Hi Damian, firstly apologies not having the time to reply to your comment as personal circumstances I’m afraid aren’t good, a bit off the old age has laid its hand on me and my good wife. Well, hmm, how to start!. It’s always difficult to convey in a few lines on social media on what would come across in real life conversation between friends as an understanding of subject matter and a wee joke. I was simply commenting on the succinctness of your comment, a lovely humorous observation on the subject matter. I was involved in the nuclear industry, fusion and fission for over thirty years as an engineer, then manager. Something I loved, I was one of the first people who helped introduce initially safe systems of work based on the NASA principle of risk assessment, introducing it throughout the UK nuclear industry to change attitudes in the workforce that inclusiveness was the way forward. So I hope you take this comment as an appreciation of your wit and not of discourse. My regards, Jack.
I found this video while casually scrolling through UA-cam and stayed for the entire lecture, well done.
This video looks like it's from an educational VHS a teacher would show in the early 2000's when they were too hung over to do more than get the big tv on the cart from the library.
Those were my favorite days in class.
Sounds like my highschool. It was in a small, very white, fairly christian town. The kids hardly got up to anything other than smoking in a parking lot or loitering outside the seven-eleven, but the teachers were all freaks and nutcases. They were as eccentric as the cast of M*A*S*H but they were real people.
Thank you prof. Ruzic for sharing all these lectures with the world for free!
Unfortunately, I never got the chance to go to a proper high school/ university. How I wish I would have been able to go to one of your classes, energy professor! Your YT videos are a joy to watch and I have learned a great deal from them. The way you teach shows that you are genuinely interested in sharing knowledge and you do so with zest and humour. Even when delving into the Chernobyl disaster you managed to make me crack a smile on more than one occasion during this rather serious topic. Hope to see a lot more of your videos!
I'm not even a student and I could listen to this guy explain nuclear power all day.
9:33 i never realized swedish might look like german to others lol.
Yeah, I blew it. I am actually fluent in German (exchange student in my youth). I thought it might have been Dutch -- but in the moment I just blurted out the first foreign language that came to mind!
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 It's the beauty of doing things LIVE :) not to worry.
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 Wait, you're actually a human, prone to errors, just like the rest of us?! I am shocked! (Well, not _that_ shocked)
A question: I am under the impression that ideas currently exist for ways to actually utilize high level wastes in a different kind of reactor - is that still science fiction, or have any strides been taken along that route yet?
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 its Dutch definitely not German. But ok you are physics professor not geography or language professor. 😀
@@vogonjelc Hey, read before you post.
At about 21:40, in the discussion of the batteries, the DC power system is not designed to run the cooling pumps. There are small support pumps like the RCIC condenser vacuum pumps that can be powered by the batteries, but the batteries mostly provide control power for critical systems. A reference for this is "Part 6 of 8 - GE Technology Systems Manual (R-304B)" available on the NRC website.
The greatest compliment I guess one can give to a teacher professor or even a coach....I wasnt one of your students. but I wish I was. You make an imminently difficult to understand subject very understandable. Thats doing your job. Bravo!!!!!
This should be mandatory viewing in all high schools.
I only wish more people would learn this.
If I had this guy to teach me in everything I would have probably finished college.
It's not the lectures that are the killer, it's the homework and the fact that each professor seems to think he is the only one giving homework.
This is like a 12 year olds level though - interesting, but for children.
“Not exactly sure why the fuel wouldn’t have just leaked into the ground… but, it could’ve just been over a swimming pool.” 😂
Pro tip...jump the house, not the pool goddammit
Thank you! This is exactly what i need to show those who a) still believe the myths about nuclear, and b) still believe we have any alternative that does not involve nuclear power.
There isn't a thing you can say to convince somebody who believes in the myths about nuclear power. The only thing you can do is keep them out of "the loop" by not letting them vote on things that pertain to it.
Subtitle are Swedish, actually.
I know that now. Thank you. Sorry I blew that -- and I should have known since I am somewhat fluent in German having been an exchange student there (45 years ago). I think it was the first thing that came to mind.
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 As a german myself, I forgive you, I wish this video were translated and played on every german television network once a day for a month. The anti-nuclear hatred here is ridiculous :-/
@@hothoploink1509 Yeah and nuclear plants were turned off in recent years in germany while facing climate crisis in the future and it's weird... politicans ruining things again.
I've moved from somewhat skeptical on nuclear power to an enthusiast based largely on the economic and scientific explanations provided on this channel. It's an unusual mix of technical detail combined with effective explanation.
I also know which type of nuclear radiation to sit on...
We should all be excited about thorium reactors. ua-cam.com/video/uK367T7h6ZY/v-deo.html
Why? The Levelized Cost of Energy from groups like LAZARDS shows nuclear is 3-5x more expensive then renewables and large renewables can be built in 18 months come on in stages while nuclear averages 7.5yrs and can take 13 like in france.
He never actually compares the economics of nuclear and renewables.
@@bertthompson4748 The analysis did not take into account the fact that to be useful, solar and wind energy require storage. Someday, it may be possible to do storage cheaply, but with current technology, Very Expensive. Right now, we build gas plants to cover the capacity, as this is the cheapest way ($151 - $198, according to LAZARDS). France nuclearized the whole country in 15 years, if US decided to nuclearize, no technical reason it couldn't do the same.
I don't think this professor has ever thought about what happens in nuclear reactors. I was a nuclear reactor operator on a US submarine. This professor states facts and conclusions but in real life, what he says does not tie together, he simply ignores too much and draws the conclusions he wants. Fukushima happened but he makes it sound like it was no big deal. A truly responsible look at nuclear power would not just gloss that over.
@@greg5023 its the potentiality right. Theres no other power source that has the potential to make large areas uninhabitable, even if its only a minor chance.
This channel and these lectures are brilliant. I am no means an engineer, but still I get the hang of the nuclear basics to be used in environmental activism. Thank you Prof Ruzic!
My dad was an Army Public Affairs Officer stationed in Germany in the 80s. A nuclear missile was being transported, when it broke free of its truck, and rolled through a sleepy German village (no one hurt). It took WEEKS for his team to get everyone to understand that:
A) nuclear missiles can't explode rolling into barns.
B) nuclear missiles don't radiate with the power of a main sequence star
C) NATO regulations don't allow for nuclear missiles to travel with the warheads attached (or in the same convoy, or even within the same week as the missile)
Didn't help that "The Day After" had just aired.
If only I were an 18 year old student again and got to take your classes, that would be glorious.
My take aways from this lecture:
Nuclear power is not really scary
This man loves explosives
Still scary.
@@ieronymos9265 Eh,there's a difference between something being scary and a person being scared of a thing.
This was a brilliant presentation. Modern lifestyles are dependent on vast quantities of energy which can only be supplied by fossil and nuclear. If the U.S. nuclear industry were allowed to advance and innovate by building new plants, the costs would go down proportionally. Fear and ignorance have hurt us as much as blind idealism.
The remarkable information you provide to your viewers needs to be applauded. I sincerely appreciate your effort to expand your viewers knowledge. A sincere thank you!
This should be required viewing for anyone in public office, local, state, or federal, etc
So timely. At 4am this morning I was on a concall that involved 3 North African Nations. One already has a functioning 2,500 hectares (6,178 acres) Solar power plant, and in the process of completing another. The 3 are expecting to construct 17 - 10,000 hectare solar plants with a capacity of 22 GW over the next 20 years. In Addition, they are seeking to build between 3 and 5 Pebble bed, sodium-cooled Nuclear power plants producing 2.5GW. Plus several desalination plants whos main function is _Not to produce potable water_ (although that is needed), but to produce sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid from the brine waste materials.
The *business model* is to sell Europe 0.6 TW of clean energy annually and other derived chemicals.
It struck me that "clean(er) energy production" is a _political issue,_ not a science issue. This could only be achieved by Nations that are not fully democratic. I can't imagine this ever being accomplished in the U.S. where 30% of the voting public believes in crazy conspiracy theories.
I hope this didn’t just come to you as bolt out of the blue? No sic a thing as (green) energy, it’s another fairy tale to help .children sleep in their beds at night all snug and tight, well you wouldn’t want to tell them that theirs a minus 40 snow storm coming and mums popping out for a new duvet and some candles, just in case?
Exactly. Sell the 'green' stuff abroad, but for domestic consumption, 30 african nations want to build properly dispatchable nuclear.
@Aditya Chavarkar Hi Aditya, apologies for taking so long to reply to your comment, I’ve been ill and in and out of hospital along with my good lady, so things haven’t been good recently. How to reply to your query without writing war and peace is a challenge due to what has become the political nature of the subject matter. I’ll start with my background as an engineer whose training starts in the mid sixties.
I view energy as work, converting joules, kilowatts into power factors from whatever substance or source they come from and their input and output. Input and output explanation, the easiest way I can put it is a microwave, say uses 2.5 kWh input to produce 800/900 watts at the output, a terrible loss yet they are everywhere, why use such useless equipment?
Why I say it’s a fairytale is due the nature of the beast, it’s essentially trying to convert low energy into high energy and this is no easy task or we wouldn’t have refineries, power stations etc as mankind always takes the easiest and cheapest route, “for free” is the golden goose of all entrepreneurs, engineers, politicians and charlatans. “Green energy” is now the “golden goose”, the honeypot of endless money for companies to make fortunes and produce very little, much like “quality” from the sixties and seventies, you should read, “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance'' for reference to that point.
Aspects of say these windmills, for them to be of any use, it’s the old chestnut, “economies of scale” and to build bigger and, hmm, better, they require child slave labour in Africa to supply the exotic metals they require to function.
Solar panels, difficult to manufacture and to decommission in a friendly environmental manner, also only China really makes them and they have an enormous environmental problem without going into detail.
To try to answer your point re hydro, dams are a way of producing energy in a reliable manner, however they have at times terrible environmental consequences, take what happened due to the dam in Afghanistan in the sixties and you’ll have an understanding why it’s in continuous war and now in Africa nations are disputing the right to dam and it may lead to war. Fresh water is a scant resource and wars will take place in the future as weather patterns change.
I followed the Italian physicist who did the maths for the solar panels and salt/sodium reactor to steam conversion plant in North Africa which has now become a reality, if it wasn’t for his perseverance the project wouldn’t have happened, it took terrible personal toll on him and exhausted him also made him ill. That is a real success in energy production but what do you do at night when you want twenty megawatts to run your steel plant or light your city or cook?
Please don’t view me as a climate skeptic or just a denier of a different way forward, from where I’m writing this, there would have been a mile of ice above my head twenty thousand years ago. The climate is the only constant which is changing from the last ice age, sure the planet is warming, however, is it for the good, or bad? Mankind would always seem to need a bogie man to scare us, it's disgraceful the way Greta is manipulated, after all she is a child and the way companies are abusing her is shameful along with politicians. War and peace, apologies Aditya, I wish we could talk instead of trying to write like this. In Scottish Gaelic, Slainte Mhath to you, keep safe.
There is a level of confusion with half lives and safety. It's the shorter lived isotopes that are the most dangerous. They're decaying fast and thus are highly radioactive. U238 has a half life of over four billion years. Which initially sounds alarming but in reality this means it's decaying inredibly slowly and thus is only very slightly radioactive. U238 is frequently used as a radiation shield!!
People have no idea about things like rate of decay.
@@lsq7833 I think there is a political agenda to maintain fear of the word 'nuclear' in general. Without fear, nuclear weapons are useless. There is not a lot of effort made to explain to people that power reactors are not fissile bombs.
@@paulanderson7796 If only people understood the things they voted on and try to suppress
Honestly this channel is amazing. Please never stop making videos you’re such a good teacher and I really appreciate your lessons!
Dr. Ruzic, thanks for this video and congratulations on using the pandemic time-off to improve fitness and weight-loss! I have been on a similar path of self-development. Here's a fact that i have been using in my Quora responses - the Annual World Energy Consumption (AWEC) is equivalent to the mass-to-energy conversion, via E=mc^2, of less than 7,000 kg. That is so small! Nuclear energy plants are our most efficient means of converting mass to energy. Good old Uranium fission can take us more than 500 years into the future of human energy requirements without greenhouse gases. Good on you to champion this unpopular-in-the-US solution to our energy needs!
I want to add a note regarding the fission part from 12:20 to 16:00. After the water which acts as a moderator is evaporated the main chain reaction will stop because Uranium 235 will not undergo nuclear fission anymore. However, the splitting process also creates many elements that continue to decay (even without water) according to their corresponding decay chain. I would have to look up the exact data. As far as I remember the lectures I took, this means that something like 10% of the nominal power still has to be cooled for a period of hours or days after the main fission reaction is stopped. Therefore a risk for a meltdown still remains. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Technically the "how much radioactivity" A and B. Largely the plants are made from materials that produce less radiation than the surrounding land and for the most part - outside California for some reason - even in failure and meltdown the major events have released less than background.
@Illinois EnergyProf
Just an idea: I was watching a UA-cam video about the Kola Borehole. It is the deepest borehole at 12Km. I understood that one of the problems drilling deeper was that the consistency of the basalt changed from solid to something that was more viscus . But for the nuclear waste that might be a solution.
Since the most of the long lived nuclear waste products are trans uranium's, the specific weight of these waste products should be larger than the basalt and other materials in the hole. Hence if we would put the waste products at such depths, gravity would slowly pull down the waste products deeper and deeper. Not sure how fast that would go but even if that is a 1Km per year that would be still be good. I would guess that other problems with for instance water are less of a problem because the viscus rock should also replace water.
For the costs, drilling such deep holes was quite expensive, but also because it was never done before and thus the technology invented. Also there might be spots where the crust is much less deep and those conditions are not that deep down.
Not sure if this would be an option or if someone already took a look at this?
Interesting but completely impractical.
The cost to drill that deep is very high. Also remember the hole is barely 1 foot in diameter. That can't hold more than a ton or so of waste.
The better solutions are like what th4 Swedes are doing: dig down and out under the continental shelf a mile or two. Then stuff it full of glass-ified waste.
Digging that kind of mine is simple and relatively cheap. It's also under a mile or more of ocean, in a place that it's extraordinarily unlikely anyone will ever accidentally disturb.
And it's good for 100k or more years. Well beyond when it's dangerous to anything.
@@erikanybody4298 Interesting that you say its impractical. Its never been done and there might be several ways of doing this.
Using the Kola Borhole for this might be expensive. However, one of the big costs was that they had to invent everything. A second hole is much cheaper.
Additionally, there are probably other locations in the world where these conditions can be found much closer to the surface. That would also reduce the costs a lot.
For the amount of material you can store in there, that depends very much on the viscosity of the rock. If if would sink at 1 km per hour (very slow walking speed) than in one hour 0,3^2xpix1000- 282m3 waste could be put in there. You continue to put more waste in there as it all sinks away.
For the SFL (the long term storage you mentioned in Sweden ), they indeed store nuclear waste in 500m deep bedrock. That is a nice option, but the problem is that you do not know what will happen in 100.000 year timescales. This is made worse by the interaction with ground water. If something would leak, it could contaminate the ground water might circulate to other places.
@@erikanybody4298 I prefer the way the Americans are placing their deep repository. Just dig some holes into a salt deposit: salt is ductile meaning that holes are closing by rock pressure after a while. And it is a good thermal conductor, which is helpful when storing highly radioactive waste to avoid hot spots. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant And if somebody mentions that salt is soluble in water, ask why salt domes have not been washed away in the last dozen of millions of years.
I'd really love you to do a vid on molten salt fueled reactors. Specifically, the possibility that bad chemistry can cause the fissile material to settle out of suspension and cause unintended criticality. This seems to be an issue that molten salt proponents fail to mention when they say these things will be "walk away safe". If the operators let the chemistry get away from them the safety could be out the window?
You are indeed talking bad chemistry.
First, if you choose the correct salts, the fissile material (likely as uranium/plutonium fluorides/chlorides) are IN SOLUTION (a chemical phenomena), not in suspension (a physical phenomena, not chemistry).
Secondly, you do have to manage the reduction/oxidation capabilities of the salt (typically by adding extra fluorides/chlorides or lithium/sodium), but that management is on the order of days/weeks, not microseconds. The solution won't suddenly tip its oxidation state - certainly not in the time it takes the salt to cool and solidify in a shutdown - and once the salt is solid, then the mobility needed for a hot-spot to occur has disappeared.
@@factnotfiction5915 Thanks, exactly the sort of information I was suggesting.
@@factnotfiction5915 I'm not sure if this is what they were getting at, but you can have noble metal fission products precipitate out of solution depending on chemistry and temperature. That was an issue they noted with the MSRE, with noble metals, over time, precipitating and plating onto the inside of the heat exchanger towards the end. This was an issue Oak Ridge had planned on addressing with the MSRE2, but it wasn't a major issue though. Just one of the reasons why they needed to develop processes and methods of tracking chemistry in the reactor on a more real time basis. That's something we can do today though.
He's done one.
Randomly checked in to this channel and I love it. Great education and presentation
I think a good point about Fukushima is that there's no such thing as the Onagawa disaster, even though the nuclear plant at Onagawa was closer to the epicenter of the earthquake and got hit with the largest part of the tsunami.
My first civilian job after leaving the army was the south Texas nuclear project.
That was in 1986, we still generate power from those two reactors.
I truly wish people would wake up and build several more in each state.
People around the world have constantly increased their consumption of energy and endlessly hope and beg to find a solution yet they fear the only solution which would render the production and use of electricity a moot point while doing it in a much safer fashion than anything currently in use today including wind and solar.
Great video, anyone actually interested in clean energy should watch it. Also, this man's ability to write backwards with his left hand is amazing beyond words.
psst...
mirrors ;)
You can't see it in this video, but in any that are set up like this that have any sort of writing anywhere on the shirt or clothing it's instantly noticeable. He's writing 'forwards' to himself and the image is just reversed :)
(I thought the exact same thing until someone explained it to me!)
@@AsmodeusMictian The secret is revealed.
"Turtles into ninja warriors..." lol, I like this guy 🤣
I want to save this video to show people because that's what you always hear when people object to it that the waste is so bad. What they don't talk about with wind and solar is all the environmental damage getting the stuff out to make the panel and the blade and how is not profitable to recycle so they just throw the stuff in landfills after 15 or 25 years average. So this is going to be a very valuable video. Thank you for doing that.
Excellent lecture video, thanks for tackling this important topic! Especially in a way accessible and understandable to the public.
Thanks professor Ruzic. The earlier people and politicians realise that Nuclear is actually the safest and cleanest way to go is better. Instead of wasting money on wind and solar, messing up landscapes, we should have invested in Nuclear like France did. And be independent of undemocratic countries that live off money they get from selling fossil fuels.
Amen, Ephel! Preach!!
I work in utilities and convincing the general public of this is so incredibly hard. Hell, we have a lot of people who come into the office thinking of all the things this awesome professor is mentioning and we have to show them the impirical evidence hidden from them in college.
David Ruzic is a godsend and his word needs to be spread far and wide!.
Youve got that wrong. The LCOE of nuclear is 3-5x higher then solar and wind and it takes 3-5x longer to build.
Nuclear is far and away the unsafest and dirtiest way there is.
What's really going here is a fetish for radiation like pyromaniacs have for fire.
And France liked to build many of them near the borders to other countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland) or near the ocean.
@@satanofficial3902 If look at the actual figures, average coal / gas plant emits far more chemicals that the Nuclear. Yes, the wastes have to be stored, but so do millions of tonns of other stuff that we currently bury, dump in the ocean etc. If careless soviets hadn't build those pathetic reactors I guess there wouldn't have been any doubts about which way to go in producing energy.
Even though I'm currently living low energy 100% from solar power, I fully support nuclear over current solar.
Solar is a good tertiary method due to its limitations on efficiency, location, and WX (weather). I have considered putting solar panels on my home to offset grid use, still working out the details to ensure its financially solid as its a long term fixed investment.
That being said, nuclear works just about everywhere, and you can scale the shit out of it. Now once we start talking about Gen 4 nuclear, we can start talking about taking our current waste fuels and burning them again, and they are meltdown proof designs. If Fukushima was even a Gen 3 much less a Gen 4 and it got hit directly by a Magnitude 12 earthquake and a 60 foot tsunami, it likely would have had no radiation release.
I have plutonium sandwiches for dinner. I used to be low energy and constanly feel tired. Now I'm pumped up 24/7 and don't even need any sleep.
@@VoltageLP You should be eating Uranium-233 sandwiches, they are much more energy dense and better for you.
@@Spartan536 how about Thorium Tortillas? 🤣
@@VoltageLP And you have that Oh So Healthy Glow about you... 🤣🤣🤣🤣
THANK YOU SIR! I was aware of most of these facts by picking them up over the years. It's fantastic to have them all in one lecture. Michael Crichton's talk on complex systems covers the hysteria and propaganda that came from Chernobyl. I highly recommend it.
Fantastic lectures from Illinois EnergyProf, all of them. Complex matter explained so that really everybody can understand it: it takes great expertise to do so...
People really need to see this
About the whole “no radiation at the plant”. Inside the reactor to the mods built under the chamber, there is radioactivity, but it’s not lethal and can be treated with a standard scrub. Once you were exposed to 25mil you were done for the year.
If you listened, he was referring to radiation given off by the plant itself to the people outside of it, the average person.
I'm not sure what the hell "the mods built under the chamber" is supposed to mean, but there is certainly radiation inside the reactor, very VERY lethal radiation, which is why nobody works inside the reactor (also, it's full of metal and water and steam, so there isn't any room). In the parts of the power plant where people work, there isn't any radiation. It all contained by the reactor vessel and the containment building, and the containment building is sealed off and no-one is allowed to go in while the reactor is running.
Radioactivity is not what to talk about. It is radiation. Radiation cannot be remove unless you remove the source of the radiation. Contamination is when a radioactive material is on the surface of an object. Contamination can be removed.
17:25 "but Fukushima!" Yeah, those buildings exploded because they were giant pressure cookers and blew up because of that, not because of nuclear fission. This talk makes me feel so amazing. Growing up with a nuclear engine technician as a father really opened my eyes to the myths and propaganda surrounding it and it's nice to see it's finally making it's way into the real world
Still, there has to be a certain amount of consideration given to the geographic area where a nuclear reactor is being placed. Japan has something stupid like 49 reactors despite being on a tectonic plate that's moving and being subject to tsunami-waves, earthquakes and tornados. Reevaluating nuclear power and the safety of it does not automatically give the world carte blanche to build it wherever without the know-how to run it and It's not something that's risk free.
@@Teutathis yea and the most retarded thing ever is Germany (very many tsunamis and earthquakes) shutting down all their nuclear plants because of Fukushima and replacing them with coal or power imported from coal
@@reahs4815 Well, that's the point isn't it? Countries where the factors line up and justify the use of nuclear power should utilize it because when nuclear power is an option It also tends to be the best one. Today's debate climate is sadly so polarized that either something is entirely good or entirely bad which means that we've taken a step away from reality as reality is almost exclusively a shade of grey.
Hi, thanks for providing all that info. I might just have a slight correction: The subtitles in that clip at 9:32 are NOT German. Looks more like Danish/Swedish/Norwegian
It's Swedish
The point about wind and solar progression slowing down (at about minute 3:00) is IMHO unfairly stated.. Trying to compare the change over 13 years vs the change over 5 years without expressing both as an annual rate obfuscates things.
For solar:
A factor of 15 change over 13 years is an increase of 23% per year. A factor of 2.5 change over 5 years is an increase of 20% per year.
For wind: 10x over 13 years is about 19% per year. 1.5x over 5 years is 8% per year.
So IMHO solar growth has not slowed down significantly (in the sense that with rounding of output and dates 23% looks lots like 20%...but if we were absolutely certain about the 23% and the 20% numbers then through the magic of compound interest the two paths would be vastly different after 10 years) but wind growth clearly has slowed down by quite a bit.
-Jon
You explain crystal clear that Nuclear fission is a safe, very clean way to generate energy continuously without depending on cloudless or windless days. Sadly the green people have gone more than slightly mad.
Not all of them..... I am a Marine Biologist and have been for over three decades. Despite that I do fully support Nuclear power. While renewables are great, they are simply not reliable enough at this time, especially without advances in storage technologies so that excess generated when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining can be stored and then released when the energy production drops because, you know, its a still night!
Saying that though, having worked in Conservation Biology for a while turns you into a pragmatist. Trying to find ways to conserve a species whilst impacting the human population as little as possible kind of forces you to be so!
This guy is awesome. You students are lucky to be taking his lectures!
And the US wouldn't have nearly as much of a high level waste issue if we could reprocess spent fuel.
Spent fuel is not really an "issue" from a practical standpoint......it's a poitical football.
@@dannywilliamson3340 very true. Probably should have said 'if we were allowed' to do reprocessing. We are the only country that doesn't, basically.
@@dantreadwell7421 Thank the "venerable" Jimmy Carter for that.....and whoever the oil company president was whispering in his ear.
@@dannywilliamson3340 Nixon did his part too with the prompt shutdown of the MSRE. The color doesn't matter, politicians should not make scientific decisions if they have no qualification, at least that was what I thought, until I heard that Angela Merkel has a Phd. in physics so.... Im not even sure that is enough.
Reprocessing is the dirtiest and most expensive nuclear process. It creates more high-level waste than fuel it reprocesses, exposes workers and the environment to high levels of radioactivity and no one wants to buy the reprocessed fuel. It is cheaper to mine and process ore...or better yet go to another energy source. When you do reprocess waste and re-use it as fuel, what do you end up with? More fission by-products that have to be isolated from all life for longer than mankind has been in existence. No one is re-reprocessing spent fuel and no one is disposing of radioactive waste (20-30 tons of high-level waste and 50-70 tons of low-level waste generated per reactor annually and all those ore tailings and contaminated soil and water) Oh, and the most polluted nuclear sites in the world are all waste reprocessing facilities. I have a better idea. Let's quit using nuclear energy and go with cleaner, safer and easier to deploy renewables, which are 4-10 times cheaper than nuclear. And renewables do not have a weapons proliferation problem. Worldwide, nuclear is in stark decline and renewables are rising. Fusion has been 20 years away for the last 40 years with no end in sight and still throwing good money after bad. Big finance is pouring vast sums of money into renewable investments. Last year, renewables overtook fossil fuels as the largest portion of the EU's energy production. Renewables was second only to natural gas in the U.S. India is building the world's largest energy complex in Gujarat with wind and solar. Australia is building the largest solar farm. BP is investing 10 billion pounds in wind farms in Aberdeen. Nuclear reactors are shutting down all over the world and having massive cost overruns, construction delays (the gangs that cannot weld or pour concrete straight) and shutdowns at new reactors at Hinkley Point, Flamanville, Vogtle, Taishan, and Olkiluoto. Given the rapid advances in renewable energy, grid and storage technology and the absolute urgency of the climate change crisis, we can't continue to waste time and money on 20th century fossil fuel and nuclear technology with all their liabilities.
P.S. The entire nuclear fuel chain from mining to reactor construction and decommissioning (if it ever happens) to waste burial (if it ever happens) is highly carbon-emitting and has a negative impact on climate change, the health and continued existence of every living being and the environment. We don't need no steenkin' nukies.
All my electricity comes from nuclear reactors. I don't give it a second thought. If the public wants EVs, nuclear energy is how much of that infrastructure will need to be supplied.
They do not...
@@mattlane2282 nuclear is perfect for EVs
@@reahs4815 Yeah sure... I love radiation in the morning rofl... plant food vs radiation...
Shit i exhale vs radiation...
Yeah nuclear is perfect you go live by it
@@mattlane2282 Yea I would live next to a nuclear plant to get 100% clean always on power. also, there is 0 absolute none radiation making it out of the nuclear plant let a lone the containment building
Bet you would not like to live next to a wind farm or a solar field
ua-cam.com/video/TRL7o2kPqw0/v-deo.html
Prof. David Ruzic has such content and cadence in his speech that I just want to listen. I am a student who was inspired to work with nuclear materials thanks to the professor. I hope to one day meet you Professor and share a spirited talk about nuclear materials.
Thank you David! Exceptionally well done as usual!!!
A 35 minute lecture from the Prof?? Christmas has come early!
Actually, with Fukushima they did know it was possibility, and they were repeatedly warned about it, but they refused to admit their mistake and make the expensive modifications for such an extremely unlikely event, even when the whole country was waiting for the next big one
Maybe the decay heat could power a Sterling engine that powers the cooling pumps... I wonder if it would be enough to power a self sufficient system for cooling the spent fuel pools and/or the reactor? (assuming you've got a heat sink like sea water)
"Nuclear waste are not Green Goo that turn turtle into Ninja warrior" can we use it as a citation ? Always a pleasure to watch you and I will recommend the video for "cyberpunk after nuclear reactor blow-up believers".
That would be much cooler tho...
This guys full of shit... how come no talk about japan? Oh right cause the cores are LOST... and it has radiation all over the ocean... all over the area... tons of people died from it.. "safe"
@@mattlane2282 He did... You just don't know anything at all... (and is wrong).
@@nt78stonewobble And is wrong..... rofl... i did not watch the entire thing cause it's BS... I did some nuclear reactor stuff in school so tell me all about how I am wrong... nothing EVER leaks right? Put it in your backyard with radioactive leaks... enjoy your cancer...
@@mattlane2282 "And is wrong..... rofl... i did not watch the entire thing cause it's BS... I did some nuclear reactor stuff in school so tell me all about how I am wrong... nothing EVER leaks right? Put it in your backyard with radioactive leaks... enjoy your cancer..."
Under normal operation little to nothing leaks.
You also said that tons of people died in japan from nuclear power. That's not true...
Just a suggestion, could you do an episode on thorium molten salt reactors? They're not pressurized, they produce xenon for interstellar space travel for NASA, molybdenum 99 for cancer diagnostics therapies and research. The excess he could be used for water desalinization and petroleum distillate manufacturing. We need diesel fuel right now, and Diablo Canyon California could use the water.
Finally someone did it, thank you professor Ruzic.
That spent fuel can be used in molten salt reactors. There's enough of it to last for hundreds of years.
Dude... I want to have your baby. I've been yammering about LFTR for years and everyone just looks at me like I have antlers growing out of my forehead.
@@throwaway692 the word is getting out. I got my friends talking about it.
@@throwaway692 Only in certain kinds of MSR's. Used fuel rods can't be used in a LFTR, which is a thermal spectrum reactor. Used fuel rods containing unburnt fuel as well as a small percentage of transuranics can only be burned in a fast-spectrum reactor. Elysium Technologies and TerraPower both have MSR fast spectrum reactors which could burn used fuel rods, but fast-spectrum reactors are inherent proliferation risks. LFTR's aren't though, for a couple reasons (only one of which is the U-232 issue).
@@williamsmith1741 proliferation risk is minimal with the mcsfr.
@@randallgoldapp9510 I suppose you're talking about either Elysium's or TerraPower's reactors? If so, that's true, I'm afraid that's not actually the case, as only both of those reactors shouldn't be producing excess fissile material because they are stated to be operated as burners, with the operators only feeding them enough material to maintain criticality. My point is that this is an operational choice. There is nothing intrinsic about those reactors preventing an operator from changing their mind at some point down the line and start feeding more material into the reactor than just what's necessary to maintain criticality. This is simply the unavoidable consequence of the high breeding ratio of Pu-239 in the fast spectrum.
It's actually also one of the benefits of fast spectrum reactors like Elysium's vs. thermal spectrum reactors like Oak Ridge's LFTR. The LFTR has VERY low breeding ratios, 1.05 to 1.07, meaning it consumes almost all the fuel that it produces in an endless cycle. That's great in terms of efficiency, but if you want to start a second reactor, it kind of sucks because it's going to take your first reactor between 17 and 25 years to produce enough excess fissile material for you to use it to start a second reactor. Fast spectrum reactors running on the plutonium cycle, on the other hand, have very high breeding ratios, giving them the ability to produce a lot more fissile material than what they consume. So your first reactor can quickly produce enough excess material for you to start a second reactor.
Additionally, fast neutrons also have a very high chance of fissioning any of your transuranics in the reactor, such as Pu-239, Pu-240, Pu-241, Am-241, etc. So you're burning up all of that transuranic material, but you'll also be producing more new Pu-239 from the U-238 in the reactor. So, now imagine you've got two buckets, one full of U-238 and one full of Pu-239, Pu-240, Pu-241, etc. You're reactor will be fissioning everything in the Pu bucket, making the amount of material in that bucket go down. However, you'll also be turning material in the U-238 bucket into new Pu-239 which then gets transferred to the Pu bucket refilling it. If you make the operational choice to just feed U-238 into your reactor, over time, the relative isotopic concentration of Pu-239 in the Pu bucket will keep increasing until you have almost pure Pu-239. If you also choose to feed in more material that what is needed to just barely maintain criticality, you will cause the total volume of material in that Pu bucket to increase.
This is a simple result of the fact that U-238/Pu-239 has very high breeding ratios in the fast spectrum and the fact that all transuranics generally have a high fission rate in the fast spectrum. You can't engineer that away.
LFTR, on the other hand, has a borderline anemic breeding ratio, which just by itself, makes LFTR's ENCREDIBLY proliferation resistant. Then, when you tag on the whole U-232 issue, LFTR's become as close to proliferation proof as physically possible.
Rocket powered fighter jet
Rocket powered semi truck
Rocket powered locomotive
Rocket powered rail car
This video taught me you can power anything with rockets.
And should!
Man, I would love to have some classes with this professor
You're not the only one.
I had a class with another one of the NPRE profs at Illinois, Magdi Ragheb, and he was great too.
Maybe one day you will have that chance, but to start I’d do away with the Rick pfp.
Great video people need to see this
Awesome video, please may our eyes be opened to nuclear power
You really need an audio level pass in your editing process. Your volume is all over the map.
Excellent video otherwise!
I agree. We fixed the video -- this is probably our best since taking over from the professionals who did my first large group. We will work on it!
A video on how to make Nuclear cheaper could be good. ;)
IMO, we could make nuclear cheaper and faster to build with modernized regulations and improved licensing.
SMRs
Making it cheaper is 1000x more important than all the scare stories covered in this video. If it can't compete with solar / wind + storage then it's going to disappear from Earth. Very useful in space though...
@@AmusicsiteCoUk Actually,that's the one thing I'm not worry about. If we ban all the fossil fuels or we eventually run out of them, people will immediately realize that wind and solar only generate a pathetic amount of electricity. At that point, you got no choice other than building more nuclear power plants.
Let's scrap the contaiment building, the 25km² exclusion zone and the decomission fund. That ought to bring down costs, they are passively safe right, so who needs containment.
Can you name any regulations that youd want removed and how much money it would save on cost or is this an unsubstantiated feeling?
There’s a simple reason we aren’t 100% nuclear in USA despite having infinitely many geologically safe locations to make it happen: POLITICS & GREED.
Love these lectures. As a chemistry student I am really deep into energy production methods.
Hey Prof. Ruzic, please keep uploading, I really like your lectures and they keep me engaged on a topic I wouldn't have thought interesting until your videos.
Thanks,
-Student
9:29 German? Are you sure about that hahaha
No. It is Swedish. See my other posts about this. Sorry!
I already watched all the other nuclear power videos, so I knew all of this already... but the guy just has such an entertaining and engaging way of presenting that I still enjoyed this vid - and it still felt like I was only watching for 15mins and not half an hour! - can't believe he only has 62K subs.... and THATS why you need to hit "subscribe"!
Awesome video, thank you for making this
you are very welcome.
22:03 Fukushima Unit #2 was able to maintain water to the reactor for 3days (70) hours,using the steam driven Terry Turbine Feed water Pump. Steam baby, stick with steam. Train locomotives ran on steam with no electricity. So did unit #2. From a proud graduate of the Petersen School of Steam Engineering..lol. 500 bucks 12 week course back in the day.
"Train locomotives ran on steam with no electricity."
- No. They ran on coal. You burned fuel to heat water that produced steam that ran the train. The fuel source was coal and not steam.
Good explanation and I dig the presentation style
If you can make it so that nuclear reactors DO in fact create ninjas out of turtles, I think the public support issue would be taken care of. 😜
It seems they just needed reasons to strap rocket engines to something haha.
29:47 You can tell they had fun with this.
I love narrating that video.....
Nice video. Please explain scrubbers for coal plants and how low their emissions can be made to go. Also demonstrate the differences in employment numbers between types of energy. Knowledge is golden.
Thank you.
Looks like you have a point to make. Why don't you make it?
Not being adversarial... just asking why you want someone else to say something you seem to want to say.
@@xander395 No problem. You have my apologies if I phrased the request for information poorly. The point is simple, I was asking for information that I would find interesting. Which is why watched this video. I do not know which is better or worse. I feel the more information we have the better decisions we can make. I hope that helps you.
@@oak3076 ok.. fair enough. Sorry... should not have assumed...
I've been convinced for some time that nuclear can help solve energy requirements. More so after watching this video. Well explains the reasons nuclear is safe and should be included in the production of the worlds energy needs.
That was Swedish subtitles for the dozen of us who understand it :^)
I did not, but I certainly can verify that this is not German.
I worked on all the safety and protection systems for several nuclear units, and I'd happily live on the shield building of any US nuclear plant (if only they'd allow it). People get their information from movies, TV, and highly compensated "non-profit" environmental groups. I bailed out and now work in a different technical discipline after noting how the public's lack of knowledge made my employment an uncertain proposition with regard to the long term...
I wish people were more educated. Ask anyone basic science questions, even so-called "common knowledge" like "how old is the Earth" or even "what is the radiation" and you might get surprised ;) Veritasium has a video from a few years ago where he asks about radiation on the streets and people don't know much about it although collectively they provided some semi-decent answers ;) Perhaps this is just the editing of the video or the selection bias.
Good video, thank you. One minor comment though, the subtitles are definitely not German. Probably Swedish.
Yes it is swedish.
I thought it was Finnish cause they're big into Nuclear Powerplants.
@@filipeleal6667 The Germans tried in the 40's. Couldn't get it critical.
Yes indeed. I really blew that. I am even fluent in German (or at least I was 45 years ago when I was an exchange student there!) I think it was just the first thing that came to mind.
The subtitles are definitely Swedish
No matter how many times I watch your lectures, I always get caught off guard by that explosive intro...
thank you for this video ive been showing it to friends i know who have been worried about the new nuclear power plant going up in my state of Wyoming and its saved me a lot of arguments.
If anyone is interested in radiation related incidents, I'll throw in a plug for the channel 'Plainly Difficult', he has a bunch of mini-documentaries about various disasters, and quite a few radiation related ones. Interestingly, only a few were actually related to reactors.
And so few deaths.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk Very true. The only reactor deaths (outside of Chernobyl) I remember from that channel was an experimental Army reactor that was meant to be portable. Due to some design flaw the control rods had to be retracted the first few inches BY HAND to start the reactor. One of the poor techs ended up pinned to the ceiling by a fuel rod, the other 2 scalded by radioactive steam. It's theorized the rod was stuck and slipped as he pulled on it extracting it just to far, causing a near instantaneous runaway.
@@kratz9 You speak of the SL-1 accident in Idaho in 1961.
do we really want nuclear power if it DOES'NT turn turtles into ninja warriors.