Hi Vincent! Yes, Australia does have an operational reactor, namely the Open-pool Australian lightwater reactor (OPAL) in Lucas Heights. It's a 20 MW research reactor that has been running since 2007.
We dump it in the pits where we dug it out🙃. Sorry for the pun, but I'm from Namibia, one of the largest producers of uranium ore and yellowcake, worldwide. We don't have spent nuclear fuel here, but obviously quite some volumes of radioactive waste.
50 years ago, the United States had a nuclear fuel recycling facility. It was operated by Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc., a subsidiary of Getty Oil Company. It was located at West Valley, NY. I was one of the contractors that decommissioned the plant and vitrified the waste stored there (600,000 gallons).
This was a huge debate in the United States not long ago and kind of still is. Members of US Congress came out to discredit nuclear waste recycling to push solar and wind power. I wouldn't blame the US states that rely upon fossil fuel for a good portion of the state income as the reason why refineries, pipelines, fossil fuel powered energy plants, dams and desalination hydroelectric facilities, and nuclear plants all got shut down with the last few years. The people pushing solar and wind power are against everything else and have been working hard to shut down everything else. The new international movement to recycle nuclear waste is the primary reason why there is renewed interest in researching and constructing generation 4 nuclear power plants. Right now most nations that use nuclear power are building or restoring older plants into generation 3.5 plants or simply continuing to use gen 2 or gen 2.5 plants.
The people that want solar and wind power have been responsible for shutting down refineries, pipelines, fossil fuel powered energy plants, dams and desalination hydroelectric facilities, nuclear plants, and refusing to permit drilling, oil exploration, and the harvesting of methane in the last few years.
@@98Zai They didn't see any incentive there because the US government made it impossible to. Are we just going to forget that American anti-nuclearism existed?
My only note on this is that I wish you'd taken just a moment at the beginning to not equate "nuclear waste" with "spent fuel rods" because there's a significant amount of "nuclear waste" that is simply rubber gloves and steel cages and things like that which are barely radioactive, but still counted in those mass estimates. The rest was very nice and informative, thank you.
but spend fuel rods are the topic of the video (96% of the fuelrods being recycled is even mentioned in the video)and the other waste has actually a very low recycling rate. As you mentioned it is mostly rubber and plastics, which can not be recycled. So if anything, the side waste, which is around 99% of all waste created by nuclear power, is lowering the recycling rate. PS: steel and concrete can also not be put back into the recycling cycle once used for nuclear power, but they can be recycled for further use in nuclear power creating a very low operational demand for steel and concrete in the industry (much lower than for coal and solar)
Most of those low level waste aren't really that dangerous. After processing, they can often just be dumped or recycled like regular trash. The only thing preventing treating low level nuclear waste as regular waste is public perception, not any realistic safety concerns.
@@paperburnIn the UK at Sellafield there was a reprocessing plant which recycled UK and Japanese fuel rods mostly, it was closed because the recycled nuclear fuel was so much more expensive than new fuel and created such a large amount of lower level waste.
Ok if it's spent. Leaked into your water supply. Would you still drink the water from tap if city said it's contaminated a little bit or even take a shower or wash your clothes
As an engineer that's worked in nuclear waste (US), this is the best video I've seen on fuel recycling. Thank you for actually discussing the proliferation problem, it's insane that so many videos ignore it. It was also very cool seeing the orano plant - very few people get to stand by a fuel pool and I rarely see the inside of these plants in videos like this. Well done 👍
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As a former nuclear engineer and chemist, and proponent of nuclear as critical component of our transition from fossil fuels, this is a great video. One thing not mentioned was molten salt reactors (MSRs) that can burn down the existing stockpile of spent nuclear fuel (SNF). In doing so, they also produce two orders of magnitude less radioactive waste. And that waste is toxic for only a few hundred years vs. tens of thousands of years for the existing fleet of lightwater reactors. It's estimated that SNF could power MSRs for nearly 100 years without the need to mine additional virgin material. MSR designs are also inherently/"walk away" safe, meaning that in the event of loss of power, the reactor shuts itself down with no escape of radioactivity. This is a significant departure from lightwater/pressurized water reactors. Rather than operating at high pressures, but relatively low temperatures, MSRs use a molten salt that's both fuel and coolant, enabling them to operate at much higher temperatures (good for process heat applications across a wide spectrum of manufacturing sectors), at or near atmospheric pressure. Lastly, nuclear reactors should be used for four primary purposes: 1. Grid stabilization. 2. Desalination. 3. Green hydrogen production. 4. Process heat generation. Small modular reactors (SMRs), microreactors and the like can be collocated on the sites of decommissioned thermal power plants, such as coal and natural gas. There they can leverage the vast majority of the installed infrastructure, while providing continued employment for the local workforce. They can also be collocated where intensive energy demand is high and/or where the process heat requirement is great. Think aluminum smelters, iron, steel and concrete manufacturing, data centers, etc. Solar, wind, hydro (including pumped), geothermal and wave/tidal energy should comprise the backbone of all power generation; stabilized by nuclear and augmented by energy storage (lithium ion batteries, flow batteries, heat storage, etc.).
came here to say something similar. It makes no sense to store something so dangerous for so long if we have a way to reuse it AND turn it into much less material that's radioactive for orders of magnitude of less time.
my radiation background is in another field and have an interest in nuclear power and alternative reactor types such as MSRs. Great comment, thank you!
OK, sounds awesome. And now the 1 Million Dollar question? Why aren’t we (or anyone else) doing this? And please no BS response like “Oh the greens”, or “oh politics” because there are so many countries run by all political flavors, if this is the golden bullet, at least one country would invest big money to push this forward. So why not?
An extremely concise summary of the current situation. Having worked in the industry for 20 years I’ve observed first hand both the technical challenges, but also the fundamental disconnect of a society wanting quick wins, wrestling with inter generational decisions. The result in my opinion is that we keep making bad short term decisions with very long term negative consequences, but here’s the rub, because the consequences are so long term, no one is accountable.
I appreciate the video and your perspective. I do think that one element that was not highlighted in the video is the risk management benefits to recycling or at least better disposition of spent fuel. the American paradigm is the absolute worst. also, the antiquated perspective that we are setting an example for anyone by not reprocessing fuel is silly. the nuclear countries mentioned who are reprocessing all have nuclear warheads. who are we setting this example for? who are the nuclear energy countries who we are fearful of acquiring weapons?
@@trinydex There’s an SMR fast reactor project I’ve been talking to recently and they put a different spin on things. Burning spent fuel in their reactor creates an end product that in the main has a 300 year time to free release. This is genuinely interesting as when I was in Sellafield in the early 2000s they had 55,000 tonnes (not a typo) of Uranium oxide. It seems no one ever said stop when it came to recycling. So basically we’re spending escalating amounts storing the stuff when it could be burned and the end cost for storage would be much less. A final twist in the story is that we have a large store (public domain information) of Plutonium. Obviously this could be made into weapons, but the argument is that’s OK as the UK is a stable and responsible democracy. Here the question is, will the Plutonium be made into a product that can’t be made into bombs before the political situation in the U.K. declines. This is another angle on accountability. In the early 2000s again I did some work on the Geological Repository, only to be horrified to find that almost 20 years ago my older colleagues had been working on it for 30 years. As I write, there’s still no agreement on when it should be built and projects on Sellafield are 300% over budget vs 2007 estimates, and more to the point the site remains the highest hazard in Western Europe. I could go on as there have been so many interesting solutions such as Prism (probably spelt wrong, but a Pu burning reactor) which have come and gone.
@@vincentgrinn2665 1 trillion population with 95% of the surface left for nature. Lol dude. You realize agriculturally used land is not land left for nature, not at all? Let's hypothetically say we have infinite money to push efficiencies pretty close to the max we can achieve with current technology, even in that case earth can't sustain more than maybe 15 - 20 billion people. But even that would only be achievable with intensive, large scale agriculture using up large amounts of the land suitable for agriculture, replacing the natural land and therefore displacing its flora and fauna. Now 1 trillion or 1000 billion people, that is just ridiculous. You have to realize that in agriculture efficiency correlates with intensity. The more intensive the agriculture, the more efficient it is, the more food/calories per square meter you can get. However the more intensive the agriculture, the less natural it is and the less habitat it offers for the flora and fauna that used to live there before the land was converted to agricultural land. Oh and the exact same principle applies to forestry. Forests optimized for intensive (= high efficiency) forestry are very different to natural, wild forests and offer dramatically less habitat for the flora and fauna that used to live there before we turned the forest into a high efficiency forestry optimized forest. Let's look at a central European nation as an example. Germany right now with its current population/population density, guess how much land is not used by humans for forestry, agriculture or any other usage like buildings, infrastructure, etc., how much of the area is still wild, completely natural and left for nature? You'll probably won't believe it, but even with the current population only *0.6* % remain that are considered to be wild, completely natural. And these 0.6% only still exist because they're strictly protected areas like national parks. A couple of percent (can't remember the exact figure, it's roughly about 5%) of the area are considered to be at least somewhat close to its natural state. So, 1 trillion people with 95% natural land... while right now with the current population a central European nation like Germany already has not 95% but instead only 5% left for nature, with only 0.6% being wild/completely natural... Germany isn't the exception, other relatively densely populated nations in western/central Europe have similar figures.
Carbon-free power should be the only options allowed for starters. Then we need to transition to precision fermentation techniques to create dairy alternatives which would replace MOST of the inefficient dairy and meat industries... Indoor farming can also be used for everything but grains basically... And all of this could be done in 100-mile zones from major cities EASILY if people put in the effort. Why? Because that's how we used to live until recently... Rarely was food imported from halfway around the world. It was all local, organic and "whole" as they say... That's probably not nearly as viable now with urbanism so we got to get creative with technology...
Kudos to the french guy for all the effort he has put into speaking in english! Not complaining, his english is great, it's just that there is much resistance in general for the french to speak english
As a french i can say it s not so much about "resistance" rather than poorly implémented teaching of langages. And it is getting worse recently as the school got severly underfunded under macron. Even French is poorly mastered now by newer graduates, even in elitist fields. (I often grade medical students exams, and it is a sorry sight 😅)
I'm very surprised by your point of view. To be honest, I would not go so far (like resistance). The issue is way much simpler: most of french are just bad at english… Same idea than Occam's razor. It doesn't mean that French are not proud of their language.
He is good at Speaking English because it's the Linga franca of the scientific world, English is what he uses to speak to his colleagues all over the world.
@@etienne8110 you mean, how macron got rid of administrators and got more teachers? Lol. It's not that anyhow, it's the attitude in the schools where I've worked and the teachers saying stuff like "ton anglais est dégueulasse" to struggling students. Also, thanks to the Internet + streaming most students who want to learn English are nearly fluent.
In Germany people ran Amok against the Nuclear recycling plant in Wackersdorf. Later attempts at recycling spent fuel rods drew massive protests where people chained themselves to railroad tracks to prevent nuclear recycling (Castor transports). So the fact that it is recyclable is well known in Germany, just not wanted.
there is a saying people get the governance that they diserve, and probably the energie to:-) that being said, economicly it is questionable if recycling nucleair wast is a succes, but from the prospect of taking up responsibilty it is miles ahead compared to the oil industrie and especialy the renewable industrie.
As long as it's outputs radiation it can be used for energy. Note the transport caskets for the waste was said be at 300°C. I fairly sure that's above boiling and therefor producing steam. We don't always have to recycle we can just use different type of reactor to take advantage of the less energetic fuel.
Germany doesn't even want France to do it. I heard that France could use much more of its existing nuclear plants but German reps keep blocking them in the EU energy council in response to demands from the anti-nuclear movement. It sounds well-intentioned but misguided
This vid is ALMOST accurate, and it still feels pretty anti-nuclear, particularly when trotting out the nuclear bomb footage. Yes, someone did make plutonium for a bomb using a CANDU reactor but NO - the reactor was not run correctly to produce electricity. It was NOT from the plutonium from spent fuel. Just because it is "plutonium" does not mean you can make bombs. It is the same problem you get trying to make bombs from natural uranium. Remember the vid mentions U235 - that in high enough concentration (typically well over 90%) makes a bomb, but a reactor runs about 4% with fresh fuel. Plutonium from reactor fuel is a wide mix of isotopes. It is NOT bomb material. The vid also mentioned "fuel is radioactive for 100,000+ years". What it should say, is "more radioactive than the average background". When you pull out the plutonium, you are left with fission products (correct in the vid) but those decay away quickly. 300 years is enough to drastically lower the emissions. The plutonium can then be used for fuel (particularly when mixed with regular U238) as "MOX fuel". As for those "experimental" reactors, they are called "breeders", they consume the U238 which a normal reactor can't do. Instead, the U238 is bred to a mixture of plutonium (gasp!) isotopes, or you start with thorium and breed it to U233. Both of those can be used as fuel, which is why it is said that 96% of the "spent fuel" contains energy being thrown away. The development of breeder reactors started in the 60s. Lack of funding and public fear basically halted development until about 10-20 years ago. We should soon see the results of their development. The biggest problem with nuclear power is too few members of the public understand it. Once you learn about it, your fear drops away.
@LFTRnow one thing I disagree with is always the framing that "stupid public be so fearful".. Many things that also stopped development in breeding&recycling stopped with the The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.. Which was not stupid public, but global politics.. and the other thing is, the public is not just "stupid fearful", they lost trust. How did this happen? For example when the Windscale Brand was for many years tried to cover up. Or when Japan goverment stepped in front of camaras and deliberately lied to the public for days. (as they said, they feared panic, if they would be honest). Anyway, when honesty isn't an option you gonna lose trust.
There is a proliferation risk involved with fuel reprocessing though, if you can extract separate isotopes you can extract Pu²³⁹ The solution to this problem is liquid fuelled reactor with a high burn up rate rather than solid fuel reprocessing.
@@MostlyPennyCat Higher burn-up waste (from PWRs and BWRs rather than CANDU) contain a much higher percentage of Pu-240, which makes building a weapon much harder (and a fizzle more likely). Yes you could try to centrifuge it, but then the mass difference is not as great as between U-235 and U-238, plus explaining to the IAEA why your centrifuges are unusually radioactive may be challenging. France already has nuclear bombs of various sorts so the proliferation risk is lower. Look at how uranium enrichment works; proliferation risk but managed. Note that SHINE Technologies (of the USA) is working with Orano to develop reprocessing where the Uranium and Plutonium are kept together.
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The white smoke coming out of the cooling towers is water vapor, it is not radiation. Thermal electrical power plants using gas and coal have the same cooling towers and the same white water vapor. Nuclear power plants built along the sea do not have cooling towers,. Same goes for thermal electrical power plants powered by gas and coal.
@@majormayer7133 There's radioactive smoke that comes out of coal plants and it's a commonly mistaken belief that nuclear plants release radiation like that.
@@majormayer7133 Nobody claimed it was radiation. Don't know what the guy is rambling about. Radiation is invisible to the eye, however, a byeffect of radiation caused by fission can be Cherenkov radiation, which looks like a faint blue glow.
this facility doesn't just recycle the nuclear waste of France, it also takes in the waste from the Netherlands and Belgium as those two countries together only have 3 plants i think
Some 10% of nuclear electricity in France today is generated by recycling materials in the form of MOX fuel, Orano said, and this can rise to 25% and to almost 40% if used MOX fuel is further recycled.
yeah makes you wonder why it's not 100% of the waste they are burying the stuff instead of suing it to make power when we need more clean power to reduce carbon emission's this mmakes me sad they arn't using all of it to make power
@@HappilyHomicidalHooligan The only reason I can think of that it wouldn't is that the plutonium levels exceed some safety margin or that the remaining fissile materials are in a different combination due to the presence of the plutonium causing different reactions.
It helps to think of nuclear fuel not as the gasoline (petrol) in your car, but rather the lubricating oil for your engine. The oil never stops being oil, but it does accumulate carbon residue, metal shavings, dust, and other detritus, thus becoming less and less effective. (In nuclear materials - the daughter products of the decay chain can absorb neutrons and thus degrade the efficiency of the fuel assembly) At a certain point, you are going to change the oil make sure the vehicle operates efficiently. Now what to do with this oil? Stashing it in paint cans around the garage only works for so long. Now you could run the stuff through filters and magnets to remove the particulates, then boil it in a hydrogen enriched atmosphere to refine out a new hydrocarbon substance - but that takes a lot of equipment and knowledge of chemistry. Especially if new bottles of oil are cheap and easily available - it makes very little sense to be doing this on a personal scale. It should be noted that the supply of Uranium was very uncertain in the later 1940s and early 1950s, so there were a number of projects started for reprocessing. However, more reserves of Uranium were found and the processes for refining it became more efficient. As time went on more responsibility for power plants was transferred from government service to private companies who in turn focused on cost-cutting even more. Unlike Russia, Canada, and the USA - France didn't have a great untapped Uranium source in an unexplored part of the country, so recycling continued to make sense to them. Their independent streak and desire to build nuclear weapons also made research into refinement/recycling lucrative.
@@cristoforestman That is a true point. I was focusing on France, as that is where the video is taking place. But we can look at some of the other countries and more interesting examples of what does or doesn't motivate the construction of these facilities. Japan - like France - doesn't have much domestic Uranium mining and thus it was also part of a self-sufficiency plan. Furthermore, they don't have a middle of nowhere to store waste - and while I don't know much about the island's geography, I doubt they have a spot that would meet the stability requirements for a facility like Yucca Mountain. Russia's Reprocessing plants are left-over from the Soviet Era. That of course a whole discussion of a different economic system, paranoia about importing things from the West, and a design philosophy for nuclear weapons that requires rebuilding warheads more often than some other configurations. Major releases of material from some of these plants are occasionally used as an argument against nuclear technology in general. Britain had both a domestic nuclear weapons program, a lack of Uranium in the isles, and a harsh post-war financial situation that made the idea of charging others to handle waste seem like it could be a decent source of revenue. Even at the time people complained about the UK becoming Europe's nuclear dustbin. Also - some of the early British nuclear plants used a magnesium based fuel cladding that degraded in water, so they couldn't be left in cooling ponds for great lengths of time and thus required additional handling.
"You don't NEED to recycle" Well while that's true I would counter with well just because you don't need to doesn't mean you shouldn't. It would make nuclear power far more attractive if we were able to produce nuclear power with less waste over time. Sometimes it's not about cost it's about doing what's the right thing to do.
Also it's an insurance in case the price of fresh Uranium rises. Right now they can get it cheap from poor countries, but what if those countries change allegiances? What if there's a coup and the new military government demand higher prices? Reusing those fuel rods can provide security and self-reliance.
There are so many common misconceptions with nuclear energy and its byproducts. Thank you for making something so informative. I hope more and more people realize how effective and clean this energy is in the future.
Misconceptions? Or paid for misinformation... One might almost think there's a competing industry that stands to lose a lot of money if they were to lose their market dominance so they invested in displacing a variety of other industries (trains, nuclear etc)
Our Rejection of Nuclear Power was a Huge mistake, and the environment has payed dearly for it as we continue to rely on fossil fuels for our electricity
It all stemmed from the fear of just the word “nuclear” because of nuclear weapons. Many people unfortunately still believe a nuclear reactor is just a bomb waiting to blow.
It is more the rejection of renewable energy sources. Nuclear Power ist just a pricy step in between. And as for Germany. We are through with it. I makes no sense at all to build it up for the future again. Not for nature and especially not for profits. Yes, we could had have used it longer. But this decision window is long gone.
I love that in the end nuclear power is still steam power with more steps :D That was a great documentation, I didnt know France made such an effort in recycling nuclear waste
And a large chunk of that money would likely be due to risk management from handling tonnes of nuclear waste to separate the desirable irradiated stuff from the undesirable stuff, then having to handle the concentrated radioactive waste on one hand and safely handling the fissile stuff on the other. One major problem with recovering fissile materials from waste is that everything needs to be processed in batches small enough to never come anywhere near critical mass. Can't just throw a ton of nuclear fuel in a crucible and process it all at once since there is a risk U235 or Pu239 could settle at the bottom without active stirring and go critical. Got to split it in loads that will never contain 56kg of U235 or equivalent after de-rating for other fissile isotopes in the input waste. Too many things can go wrong if you try to be cost-effective about it.
yes but as always it is because the financial system currently doesn't account for environmental damage and cleanup. that is why we still are dumping vast amounts of garbage into landfills instead of reusing the materials: it is somebody else's problem - probably our children's or children's children's who can later clean it all up. as crazy as it sounds the GDP actually goes up if we pollute an area and then clean it up and restore it to the state it was before.
Different goals between France (sustainable and long term government strategies) and the US which is about short-term quarterly profit taking... Nuclear doesn't work like that. It has hydro-like upfront costs and lifecycles. So be prepared to spend tons up front for long-term gains... Something antithetical to American life in 2024...
13:25 When she said the materials used to recycle nuclear "waste" "generate alot of waste" I knew she was biased. Because all the nuclear "waste" Sweden has ever produced can fit a parking lot. Nuclear "waste" is the least pollutant and most space efficient byproduct of electricity generation.
i mean this is a german channel what do you expect, better excavate half the german countryside for coal rather than a stadium's worth to store waste spent rods lol
@@nousername8162 Funny thing is a stadium's worth of store would be the amount of nuclear waste made in like 50 years, and then you'd have descendants hunting for this nuclear waste to use in more efficient nuclear reactors.
@@nousername8162 Except, Allison Macfarlane used to work for the *US Nuclear Regulatory Comission* (minute 8:19 onwards), and not the German equivalent. And she has a point about the recycling process generating more waste, if you consider that the byproducts of the chemical reactions used to seperate the fission product, and then seperate plutonium from uranium needs to go somewhere as well. Since this is just a brief and simplified overview of the process, we don't know which chemicals are beig used for the seperation steps, nor what the byproducts are and what danger they may or may not pose to humans and the environment. But I bet, Allison Macfarlane does, since she has worked with nuclear energy, and subsequently also with nuclear waste and what to do with it.
Magnox stopped reprocessing in 2022 because it finished reprocessing all of the magnox fuel, it finished its 60 year job and thus closed? It was hardly abandoned
Again see my similar reply Magnox stopped reprocessing in 2022 because it finished reprocessing all of the magnox fuel, it finished its 60 year job and thus closed. Are you confusing sellafield ltd with the seperate company magnox?
15:2515:25 Recycling should always be part of the foundation of production. Self efficient for replication should always be priority for pure value and essence of progress for economics. No production of factories processes should be built without priority of recycling in 21 century. Recycling should be a priority before maintenance because the foundation is production. Fixing a problem maintains the problem of fixing. Recycling removes maintenance cycles and simply starts again from a element prospective. Prioritising production. Fixing slows production in essence and one can be removed essentially with no waste of time for machine process time. Recycling has to be priority in production in 21 century. Time and speed is achieved with recycling and production not production and maintenance for a product. It's more efficient to replace than fixing a product the machine should be a loop of element recycling at heart of energy of the product. Weather it's new or old always recycle item back in the loop process, from a elementary part. Self efficient factorys can only be achieved with recycling as part of arctechture of factory from start to finish of manufacture production of a factory design.15:2515:25
@@hmeric7495 how much energy will it take to reprocess; build, maintain, operate power plants; maintain electrical grid; convert heat to electricity, transmit, and convert back to heat?
@@juzeus9 Not much, in the grand scheme of things. Radioisotope Thermal Generators already exist. They last for years, and the only 'maintenance' required, is cooling. So to a normal household, they can provide both electricity and heating at the same time.
That would litterally be an rtg, an rtg dont need a specific kind of radioactive material but different kinds can be used for different purposes, for example some fuels give a lot of power over a "short" period while others give more during a longer period. So yes, you could make an rtg. However in a stationary plant it would probably be more effective to just use a cooling cycle that uses a different kind of cooling medium, aka the heat vapourising a liquid which drives a turbine
Not in any meaningful quantity. The fuel is very hot yes but it doesn't actually have much in the way of heat generation and they heat up rather slowly.
@@naberville3305 Hmm, well it wouldn't need to be a TON -- but I feel just hooking up a case lined with Peltier devices could be beneficial -- but might not be worth the cost ROI for the energy they generate.
Its not bad that we aren't immediately recycling it, becasue it is always available for future recycling. And it's easier to recycle once it has cooled down for a while.
@@SeriousDrazhar The isotopes that may decay on human timescales are not Uranium 235 or Plutonium relevant to power generation. They have half lives from hundreds of thousands of years to billions of years.
@@SeriousDrazhar the dangerously radioactive isotopes are far too unstable to actually use for power, there is a reason we don't use Caesium or Iodine isotopes for power despite them being insanely radioactive, they are too unstable. uranium is great because it's just radioactive enough to get hot while still being pretty stable to work with for many years.
You should be Proud of your work!!! I would like to thank EVERYONE taking part in this video! MERCI for the message you are spreading!!! And ofcourse........Viva la France!!!!!!!!
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Yeah. It’s just conversion of energy. Chemical to mechanical to electrical for nuclear energy production. If we can harness energy 100 percent, idk if that’s possible, it would be nice.
Because turbines have most effective conversion factors. So naturally that thing is used when possible. Only solar panels truly found a different way to a turbine.
@tschiyo7473 If heat could directly transform into power we would probably be harvesting geothermal spot and deep pits for about a thousand dollars with almost 0 waste It'd also break the laws of thermodynamics killing us all but it'd be Nice
@@emilwandel You can go directly from thermal to electricity with RTG's. USSR used them as remote power stations, and NASA uses them to power space probes where solar won't work. Zero moving parts. Not a lot of power output though.
The waste I'm concerned about isn't the dry cask storage reactor waste. It's the Cold War era leftover waste from building nuclear weapons that was improver stored or disposed of. Some of it has just been dumped into lakes and into the ocean in steel drums. Some of it is just capped with concrete on an island in the Pacific Ocean, with waves slowly eroding the concrete away.
I'm not sure where you're getting these ideas from. When we decommission a nuclear weapon, the fissile material has never been thrown away, it's just turned into fuel rods for power plants. Sure there's plenty of waste from the refining and enrichment of uranium, but that's a chemical waste problem, not a radiation problem. You should be equally upset about any mining and processing operations that were done back before environmental regulations. Nothing special about nuclear weapons in that respect.
@iankrasnow5383 Look up: Lake Karachay, Runit island. For two examples. For more, read the wiki on ocean disposal of radioactive waste. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste#:~:text=The%20waste%20materials%20included%20both,been%20banned%20by%20international%20treaties.
people should be more concerned about the waste generated by coal power plants : little to almost nobody talks about all the radioactive particles naturally contained in coal that get released in the air along with the smoke in the burning process, which adds to heavy metals, toxic arsenic and all the rest of the good stuff that contribute to kill thousands of people every year worldwide. (compared to less than 1 per year on average for nuclear...)
My impression was that the fuel rods themself make up a very small amount of the waste. Consumables, like gloves, clothing, cleaning supplies, old pumps are what fills the vast majority of those barrels. and those aren't going away just because you keep reusing the fuel. Re-using the fuel reduces the load on uranium mines, and I guess that's good.
Yes it's recyclable, this is why we shouldn't dispose of it. The longer it sits, the easier it is to recycle. So leave the casks sit until we need the nuclear waste / fuel in the future. Because we will need it in the future.
@haldir108 The fission products do decay away the most dangerous isotopes have the shortest half lives. The longer it sits, the less fission products exist. But some of the products take hundreds of thousands of years to decay away to safe levels.
The responsible thing is to recycle it and take the worst and scariest energy/waste parts and reuse it for good... But even the scariest parts aren't at all as you see in the video.. Just really safe and simple techniques that have been around for decades... France should partner with other nations and open co-venture regional factories for recycling around the world... Like 1 in North America, 1 in China, 1 in Eastern Europe for example... As part of the deal they could guarantee France gets the Plutonium as a safety feature just to make sure...
Love your videos DW!! Keep em coming. So much appreciation for your work to help us understand important and interesting things with accurate information. It's so important these days.
I am deeply impressed that our German DW made a somewhat unbiassed report about this topic although usually our state-run media ridiculously follow the green antinuclear policy.
Nuclear + renewables would have been the key for sustainable, climate friendly energy supply until nuclear fusion is ready. More industry nations should have done it like France, of course also including nuclear fuel recycling to minimize the amount of waste that accumulates. That said, of course while France does very well with nuclear, they're a little bit behind in terms of renewables. The share of energy from coal, gas and oil could have been already replaced with renewables by now.
I cannot emphasize enough how false hope of nuclear fusion being practical one day is. It will never happen. It takes approximately three thousand times as much energy to produce the pure (enough) Deuterium-Tritium mix it takes to initiate fusion of a pair of these isotopes, no guarantee more than a few fractions of a percent of these isotopes will react, and no hope for a stable contained fusion reaction that provides more electricity than it takes to initiate, contain, and maintain. China produces five new nuclear reactors worth of solar PV a week. With TWEST, old nuclear and fossil generating stations can be converted to effectively store enough solar power to supply need on demand when the sun doesn't shine, at low cost and without using fuel.
Most of it pretty much is already replaced. They're only using tiny amounts of natural gas for high load, and of course diesel generators for remaining off-grid uses. The last coal plant is basically just for extra heat & electricity demand (and dwindling solar supply) during winter. Plus they're already taking excess wind and solar power from Germany.
Being hopeful about fusion strikes me as odd. What advantages does fusion have that fiission doesn't? Will it be cleaner, cheaper, safer, more space efficient, easier to finance, or otherwise better in a technical, economic, or environmental way? It seems unlikely to me. It might be less politically divisive, but as far as i can tell, that's the most significant advantage.
@@haldir108 Leaving aside that practical fusion power will remain impossible, its advantages as dreamed of by those unconstrained by reality are rooted in its greater power and lesser radiation contamination. Tritium and isotopes of lithium have very short half lives and/or low radioactive signature, and fusion reactions generate 17 MeV per event, far more than fission can claim. So, arguably cleaner, except not really. It takes fission to produce tritium cost-effectively, unless you use lithium exposed to fusion reactions, so you'll likely always need fission if you have fusion, so 'as clean as' is the best you can get. Not cheaper, either, for the same reasons. Safer, arguably, but again not really. Easier to finance, as let's face it there's one born every minute. Better for militaries, since it defrays the cost of overhead for making h-bombs.
I could never understand why nuclear waste exist. If the problem is that it has so much energy left that it's radioactive at a dangerous level surely if possible to transform taught power into electricity or heat by using a different method like a PV cell tuned to the wave length of that radiation or using to heat something with a lower boiling point than water
Actually not a bad idea, though I guess the problem is that utilities think in terms of turbines and turbine efficiency is largely influenced by the temp gradient, which is much lower in the case of "beta decay heated" waste than fissile stff in a reactor. So they just keep the spent fuel at site and let it decay in a pool contributing some to the plant power output.
I think a big part of the misunderstanding is that there are 2 kinds of nuclear waste (actually 3 if you also consider depleted uranium from enrichment). There is nuclear fission product and there are unfissioned parts / transuranics (e.g. plutonium). Nuclear reprocessing is about separating these 2 kinds from each other. The unfissioned parts / transuranics get recycled into new fuel and recycling (if it's actually done) destroys that kind of waste. The fission products get stored. The fission products are the main problem here: they're radioactive enough and mobile enough in the environment to cause a giant mess if they were ever to escape storage, but their power is extremely low compared to the power obtained from fission (nuclear waste containers are often air-cooled). And with current technology, there is no way to speed up the radioactive decay to make the radioactivity go away faster. So they need to be stored for something like 1 Million years, which is a timeline where e.g. erosion of mountain ranges has to be accounted for.
@@SASAS-ru8ys Molten Salt Reactors can split long-lived radioactive elements into short-lived ones that can be safely stored (half-life up to 300 years), uranium-235, uranium-238, plutonium 239, 240 and 241, which can be reused as fuel
@@CraftyF0X 300y is still way to long considering politics already have problems planning out the next term. These timespans are too long for humans to handle properly.
Thing is you can use waste for fuel like a Matrioshka doll Spend uranium rods>extract plutonium>make MOX>Extract thorium> Thorium salt reactor>Fast neutron reactor> RTG
Fascinating video and I have a question, not sure if you can answer. The big drums used for transport. Noticed they are essentially heat spreaders. How much heat is "externally" released by the waste? Could the shielding be reduced to increase the heat being released and still block the harmful radiation? What I am thinking is could that decay of the waste be harnessed with a generator using a Sterling Engine and the heat being radiated used for the power of that engine? You mentioned that the water cooling takes 5 years, how long would that heat exists without the water cooling in a radiator style container? If this is viable it would be an amazing use for some of the material.
@@redwithblackstripesyou'd still probably be fine if you were there for only a brief moment. The time of exposure means a lot for an acute dose. 10 seconds could be safe, but 3 minutes could mean severe ARS. Just drop your bare nutsack on it and tell your friends a cool story.
German journalist talking to a French scientist in English, love to see it. As an ESL speaker, I'm fully on board with everyone using a lingua franca, it's efficient af.
Thank you for an excellent article. One important point you did not mention is that fast reactors can burn the transuranics inside the reactor during the regular operation. This would be preferable and much work has already been done on these designs.
This explains why some countries reprocess spent fuel. However, calling it 'recycling' is inaccurate as fission is a linear, irreversible process, not a circular one. Chemical reprocessing enables more complete use of fissile material, not reuse of it after use.
Why recycle when people who are paid pennies and have poor legal protections in the workplace can just dig up more for us? I'm sure it's a coincidence that those people doing the digging are often various shades of brown.
Cleanup what? Few hundred tons of material a year that can be safely contained and returned to the ground where it came from or a few billion tons of gasses pumped into the atmosphere?
Unholy alliance between greens and traditional energy lobby, with assist from militaries that don't like how some of the safer reactor designs don't produce weapons-grade material
We could make nuclear batteries, lasting about 136000 years (theoretically), but the only problem is 3 things: 1) consumers 2) people who throw batteries in fires 3) requiring a thin sheet of true diamonds on a consumer scale, which I think isn’t cheap at all and the nuclear waste.
I did an undergrad paper on this about 40 years ago. Ted Ringwood and others came up with synroc in the late '70s after learning that the fission products in the Oklo natural reactor in Gabon of about 2 bya had barely mirgrated in that time. Its radioative loading is about 4-5x that of the best glasses with the advantages that they are stable at much higher temperatures and have porosity rates a couple of orders lower than the glasses. Drill into an unfractured-by-glaciation granite pluton about 1 km below the Canadian shield, bury, backfill with self-healing bentonite clays and you're gtg for several million years. The recoverable energy in Ontario's pools was worth about $300 B in '80s dollars by about 10 years ago and it would've cost about $5-10 B to do it all. Still, a 30-60x payback can't cut it when it involves the transport of weapons-grade Pu through populated areas. The French are so French ;-)
"There's plenty of uranium, it's not necessary to recycle." How does that sound so familiar? Oh yeah, "There's plenty of oil, it's not necessary to spare it." But instead of just investing in recycling the spent nuclear fuel, I think we need either thorium based plants and/or better power grids and grid scale energy storage for renewables.
Nothing that broken wetware defect said is accurate. Individuals such as that are the entire reason so much is going wrong. Theft of oxygen should be illegal.
@@MadScientist267 I think her comment is being taken out of context. The complexity and cost is very high relative to mining virgin uranium hence there's no reason [financial incentive] to recycle. Everything she said is accurate.
@@shawnsg Until someone comes up with an excuse for something that isn't "costs too much", I don't want to hear it anymore. Goes for everything. Enough is enough.
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I worked on the Sellafield Nuclear reprocessing plant in the UK back in the mid 1980's (operated by BNFL). There were two reprocessing projects, Magnox and Thorp. That place has been online, reprocessing nueclear fuel since the mid 1970's - 50 years now.
"You can also use plutonium from from commercial reactors" Only if they have low burnup and online refuelling, both of which harm the economics of the nuclear reactor (such as a British MAGNOX or RBMK)... But inside a light water reactor... the plutonium generated is reactor grade, not weapons grade. It cannot explode and cannot be centrifuged into weapons grade due to radiation from Pu-240.... Much like the recyclable waste from a Thorium reactor, turning it into weapons grade means handling it and handling it would microwave you. Also Fission products only need 300 years of storage... not thousands.... In fact this video is just typical German misinformation carefully packaged as balanced journalism... it isn't.
The "reactor grade" plutonium with all its multiple heavy Pu isotopes when accumulated for a few years actually can detonate. The problem is that if you concentrate it enough so it can happen then stability gets so poor that it eventually just goes off on its own. This results in a very large and complex and still not very reliable nuclear bomb with poorly predictable yield but if you want to go nuclear no matter the cost then in theory it can be done.
@@Kirillissimus Weapons grade is >90% Pu-239, reactor grade can explode at 80% with some trickery that isn't open information, but a spent fuel rod is less than 50% Pu-239. So no it cannot explode, it can fissile out and microwave anyone who tries to handle it, due to the spontaneous fission rate of Pu-240. But this won't make it explode.
Cost. Without watching the video I'm saying it's because it's cheaper to use new fuel instead of reuse the old one. Let's see if I was right. p.s. Yeah, it was mostly that. The extra waste from the chemicals needed for the recycling and the danger of having to deal with the plutonium was interesting aspect though.
Funny how when anyone else has a chance to have nuclear bombs America thinks it's dangerous but when America has it its like they are angels?? When they are the devils
That sense, nuclear waste is literally impossible to reuse :D but the waste of it will stop being a problem after like 300 years if we can constrain it to just fission products and use the rest.
@@CraftyF0X There's also long-lived fission products that take much longer than 300 years to decay. One key reason why I'm pretty critical about nuclear power is that during 70 years of nuclear power, we haven't seen any actor that stepped up to properly close the fuel cycle. I.e. 1) transuranics get completely (not just the plutonium part) burned up as nuclear fuel. 2) fission products get treated in such way (e.g. by transmutation) that only stable isotopes remain after, let's say 100 years 3) depleted uranium becomes fuel, not nuclear waste. Easier and cheaper carbon-free power sources are available right now; I won't wait for nuclear power to maybe possibly "soon" get its sh*t together.
Depends on the definition of "sustainable". There are estimates that if all available nuclear fuel would be used to its full extent, it could last hundred of thousands, if not millions of years. It's a bit like saying renewables are not sustainable, because their energy comes from a huge nuclear reactor is space that will inevitably run out of fuel in a couple billion years. Yes, theoretically, but that's really not our problem now.
@@NeovanGoth i agree, there is no such thing as "sustainable" forever.. even the sun will eventually go kaput.. and yes it's not our problem "now".. but we are not talking about a couple billions or millions of years here.. the waste will become a problem in a few generation time.. just for argument sake, there are family who have grand grand children.. and we already transporting nuclear waste to other countries.. especially if we just storing the waste like this video say.. waste from 1 nuclear power for 1 year already takes so much space.. think about it if we use it for hundred of thousand of years.. they must think of something so the waste will be cycled back to nature, storage is not a solution.. no matter how big the storage is.. expand it as big as you can, it will only delay the inevitable.. if you keep filling it up, one day it will take no more.. so any waste that become a problem under a millennia .. since this is nuclear waste we talking about.. it is a significant problem to human population, let alone the risk of "stupid" people digging those back up.. you might say impossible, but from what i learn.. there is no such thing as to far, in human's stupidity and greed..
@@DommTom and unreliable, the cost goes up massively when you consider the need for batteries or other means of energy storage and the increased logistical burden on the power grid, and nuclear is cheaper in the long run it's just expensive to build initially.
@@cageybee7221 The price of batteries is falling massively and the burden on the power grid is not a bigger problem than nuclear energy being extremly unflexible. And nuclear energy isn't cheaper long term, actually the opposite. Long term is where the true costs lie. Consider deconstruction and decontamination in accordance with security standards and you'll see that nuclear energy just loses the competition. There are reasons why the number of global reactors has remained stagnant since the 1990s while renewables have been on the rise more than anything else. www.ecosia.org/images?addon=chrome&addonversion=6.0.3&q=anzahl%20weltweiter%20atomreaktoren#id=9B9F98950AAA2C03EB057C97438D7E8F486F7B8A
@@Zierfish One of the points of reprocessing is that the volume of material stored reduces five-fold, and that material needs to be stored for a few hundred years. At that point sticking it in the ground (probably in a new facility in a salt mines) becomes viable. 500 years versus 100k years is a reduction in risk by several orders of magnitude.
@@johndc2998 Canada have the nuclear technology to India. Started with a research reactor and then the ability to process plutonium from the Candu reactor. This terrified the Pakistanis which then developed their own bomb and later fold the technology to North Korea. Yeah Canada!
The rocks we were getting out of the ground was called blue stone. It's very hard. There was a lot of science that went into making it, we was only allowed to have 4 broken faces on the rocks, so they locked into each other
Our new president here in my country is an environmental scientist. If she doesn't do anything about our "normal" waste here then we're absolutely doomed.
It's not even about money, the world gives the oil industry 1 trillion dollars of subsidies each year. For that kind of money we would be able to develop fusion.
@@gaim44 Nixon wanted to build enough nuclear power plants that if he got the number of plants he wanted we would produce 2x the total power the USA produces in it's entirety with nuclear power alone. You can reprocess the nuclear was 4 or 5 times, then drill a deep bore hole and bury the waste a few miles under the surface. With that many nuclear power plants everything would be standardized and you could do things such as revitalize Appalachia by building the reactor equipment down there. You would use the nuclear power plant manufacturing industry to do launch a science equivlant of silican valley such as reactor manufacturing, waste processing, nuclear medicine isotope & CAT scanner manufacturing, nuclear research such as particle colliders. Then you would do other science things such regular medical R&D to build on top of the STEM infrastructure. You could transform Appalachia into the Netherlands such as a massive golf cart & bike trail network for eldery and teens to get the teens out & healthy socializing with peers.
often heard and everytime it is a false statement, the oil industrie is profitable, more over the taxes that are put upon oil derivatives are mindblowing, and even then they are stil competitif, so please no more oil subsidies bs! currently we do not know the limits of fossil fuels, if there are other energie sources that are better, everyone wil turn to them, no need to force them to people like the renewables these days, the only thing that is competitif to fossil fuels at the moment is nucleair energie, the present pwr technologie or the future technologies like molten salt thorium , fusion reactors have great potetials, if they would be accesable.
Fusion needs a source of neutrons to make tritium and it makes waste. It also produces high level radioactive waste (excess neutrons). The heat exchange process is problematic as U235 or Pu239 fission plants.
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when rich, nuclear countries can just print money, seems like printing money to recycle your nuclear waste is a much better idea than printing money when everyone got sick...
Great Video! I've heard of France's nuclear waste recycling, but it's great to see it in operation. fission products Those fission products, I think, are the biggest problem, besides the plutonium. These are the split halves of the atoms. Specifically, a U235 nucleus, has 92 protons and the rest neutrons. It's really too big to be stable. All elements up to Lead have stable nuclei (nucleuses) (except for Tc and Pm). Now, Protons and Electrons attract, those are positive and negative charges, that's electrical. Protons and Neutrons also attract, using 'the strong force' or quantum chromodynamics (big complex topic that I don't even understand). Now, that force is WAY WAY more powerful, but it only works over short distances. Like 100,000 times smaller, the size of a tiny nucleus at the center of an atom. So, your average Carbon atom's nucleus, C12, 6 protons and 6 neutrons, is perfectly happy. Despite the fact that the 6 protons are all repelling each other, like crazy. study up! Don't read all of this, just the introductions: different kinds of atoms: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table each kind of atom has many isotopes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope nucleus of atoms: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_nucleus chart of all isotopes of all elements: www-nds.iaea.org/relnsd/vcharthtml/VChartHTML.html So a U235 nucleus is too big - so big, that the protons on one side of the nucleus repel the protons on the other side, and the two sides are farther apart so the Strong force is weaker. It's barely hanging on. It's actually stretched to egg shape, ready to break in two. So, in a reactor, a neutron comes flying along and smacks this nucleus, and it breaks in two - that's fission. It's violent, and the results are kindof random: you usually get a big piece and a small piece. The small piece is usually some nucleus between weight 80 and 105, and the big piece is usually some element weight 128 to 150. (See periodic chart, above, and look for atomic weights, not atomic numbers.) And each can be a number of different isotopes (see chart of isotopes, above), most of which are highly radioactive. HIGHLY radioactive. And, you get a random scattering, like jellybeans spilled on the floor. The most dangerous are the ones with short halflives. Each atom will spit out an electron. If its halflife is 1 hour, then half of the electrons get spit out in 1 hour; almost all in the first day after splitting. If the halflife is 1 year, then half are spit out over a year, and almost all over 20 years - much slower. If the halflife is 1 second, then you'll see almost all of them spit out in a minute. And, some of them do have a halflife of 1 second. So this can be an enormous number of electrons, causing an enormous amount of damage to flesh, or steel, or almost anything. These fission products are the most radioactive substances on earth. You've heard of radioactive stuff that glows in the dark? This is the stuff that glows in the dark. (Plutonium? eh, not so much. 24,000 year halflife.) This is why, in the video, you saw the fresh fuel rods being kept in a cooling room for '5 to 7 years', before they even try to do anything with them.
After seeing videos about the work going into preventing future generations from digging up nuclear waste sites in the far future, I have to wonder if there will be a problem with people raiding these sites intentionally for recyclable material, in the same way people break into abandoned buildings for copper wire.
Not to mention all of the many, many layers of regulations, permits, re-permits, re-re-permits, public objections getting more credence than science, and the years of lawyer time you have to pay to swim through all of that process. THEN you get to overpay the contractors who are "the only ones qualified" because the process has driven competing companies out of the business, and the expertise is aging out. Let us not forget cost overruns, government fines for not meeting unrealistic deadlines, interest on loans...
@@MonkeyJedi99 thats if you let greens in! al your thoughts asside you see that in France they get it done, you seen the other country's as wel, and they forgot to mention Belgium we stil have 4 Gw/h of nucleair capacity, much more then manny other country's that is also served in the MOX program from Le Hague.
Yucca Mountain, USA.... Deep River or Eliot Lake here in Canada... Only Finland has opened one last year successfully and their waste issue is tiny compared to the rest of the world especially the USA...
there is a good probability there is no need to ever put stuf in final storage exept that 4%, but if you look one way, if one vieuws there are no alternatifs, we would stil live in caves, would that be better?
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@@ThomasK. wind and solar maybe cheaper … at least by now, and the power density (MW/ha) is 100x smaller in solar / wind .. it takes too much useful land not mentioned that solar will also need a cleaning cycle. We need all options open.
Atleast France is talking about this. We're all the worst at handling our waste and as is the way "awareness" is step 1. Admitting you're F'd up is the best part in the healing process.
I talked to a guy from a National lab. We’d still need permanent storage for that now really radioactive remainder. It’s also very expensive, currently much more expensive than mining.
the problem is though that only 3% of the volume of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is spent fuel that might be able to be reprocessed. The other 97% is stuff like machinery parts, personal protective gear etc that has been contaminated and other low grade radioactive stuff that isn't nearly as radioactive but is still dangerous and needs careful storage because it could still be used by terrorists to create dirt bombs etc, and you don't want any of it getting into the environment and food chain, because long term exposure to it will still kill you.
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Do you know what they do with nuclear waste in your country?
Put somewhere
From India
Mostly
Hi Vincent! Yes, Australia does have an operational reactor, namely the Open-pool Australian lightwater reactor (OPAL) in Lucas Heights. It's a 20 MW research reactor that has been running since 2007.
We dump it in the pits where we dug it out🙃. Sorry for the pun, but I'm from Namibia, one of the largest producers of uranium ore and yellowcake, worldwide. We don't have spent nuclear fuel here, but obviously quite some volumes of radioactive waste.
50 years ago, the United States had a nuclear fuel recycling facility. It was operated by Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc., a subsidiary of Getty Oil Company. It was located at West Valley, NY. I was one of the contractors that decommissioned the plant and vitrified the waste stored there (600,000 gallons).
An oil company running a fission plant? I understand why they didn't see any incentive there.
This was a huge debate in the United States not long ago and kind of still is. Members of US Congress came out to discredit nuclear waste recycling to push solar and wind power. I wouldn't blame the US states that rely upon fossil fuel for a good portion of the state income as the reason why refineries, pipelines, fossil fuel powered energy plants, dams and desalination hydroelectric facilities, and nuclear plants all got shut down with the last few years. The people pushing solar and wind power are against everything else and have been working hard to shut down everything else. The new international movement to recycle nuclear waste is the primary reason why there is renewed interest in researching and constructing generation 4 nuclear power plants. Right now most nations that use nuclear power are building or restoring older plants into generation 3.5 plants or simply continuing to use gen 2 or gen 2.5 plants.
The people that want solar and wind power have been responsible for shutting down refineries, pipelines, fossil fuel powered energy plants, dams and desalination hydroelectric facilities, nuclear plants, and refusing to permit drilling, oil exploration, and the harvesting of methane in the last few years.
@@98Zai They didn't see any incentive there because the US government made it impossible to. Are we just going to forget that American anti-nuclearism existed?
@@faberofwillandmightYup. Just watch The Simpsons
My only note on this is that I wish you'd taken just a moment at the beginning to not equate "nuclear waste" with "spent fuel rods" because there's a significant amount of "nuclear waste" that is simply rubber gloves and steel cages and things like that which are barely radioactive, but still counted in those mass estimates. The rest was very nice and informative, thank you.
but spend fuel rods are the topic of the video (96% of the fuelrods being recycled is even mentioned in the video)and the other waste has actually a very low recycling rate. As you mentioned it is mostly rubber and plastics, which can not be recycled. So if anything, the side waste, which is around 99% of all waste created by nuclear power, is lowering the recycling rate.
PS: steel and concrete can also not be put back into the recycling cycle once used for nuclear power, but they can be recycled for further use in nuclear power creating a very low operational demand for steel and concrete in the industry (much lower than for coal and solar)
Most of those low level waste aren't really that dangerous. After processing, they can often just be dumped or recycled like regular trash.
The only thing preventing treating low level nuclear waste as regular waste is public perception, not any realistic safety concerns.
@@yvrelna and cost. but yes, there are no hurdles in the process
@@paperburnIn the UK at Sellafield there was a reprocessing plant which recycled UK and Japanese fuel rods mostly, it was closed because the recycled nuclear fuel was so much more expensive than new fuel and created such a large amount of lower level waste.
Ok if it's spent. Leaked into your water supply. Would you still drink the water from tap if city said it's contaminated a little bit or even take a shower or wash your clothes
As an engineer that's worked in nuclear waste (US), this is the best video I've seen on fuel recycling. Thank you for actually discussing the proliferation problem, it's insane that so many videos ignore it. It was also very cool seeing the orano plant - very few people get to stand by a fuel pool and I rarely see the inside of these plants in videos like this. Well done 👍
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As a former nuclear engineer and chemist, and proponent of nuclear as critical component of our transition from fossil fuels, this is a great video.
One thing not mentioned was molten salt reactors (MSRs) that can burn down the existing stockpile of spent nuclear fuel (SNF). In doing so, they also produce two orders of magnitude less radioactive waste. And that waste is toxic for only a few hundred years vs. tens of thousands of years for the existing fleet of lightwater reactors. It's estimated that SNF could power MSRs for nearly 100 years without the need to mine additional virgin material.
MSR designs are also inherently/"walk away" safe, meaning that in the event of loss of power, the reactor shuts itself down with no escape of radioactivity. This is a significant departure from lightwater/pressurized water reactors. Rather than operating at high pressures, but relatively low temperatures, MSRs use a molten salt that's both fuel and coolant, enabling them to operate at much higher temperatures (good for process heat applications across a wide spectrum of manufacturing sectors), at or near atmospheric pressure.
Lastly, nuclear reactors should be used for four primary purposes:
1. Grid stabilization.
2. Desalination.
3. Green hydrogen production.
4. Process heat generation.
Small modular reactors (SMRs), microreactors and the like can be collocated on the sites of decommissioned thermal power plants, such as coal and natural gas. There they can leverage the vast majority of the installed infrastructure, while providing continued employment for the local workforce. They can also be collocated where intensive energy demand is high and/or where the process heat requirement is great. Think aluminum smelters, iron, steel and concrete manufacturing, data centers, etc.
Solar, wind, hydro (including pumped), geothermal and wave/tidal energy should comprise the backbone of all power generation; stabilized by nuclear and augmented by energy storage (lithium ion batteries, flow batteries, heat storage, etc.).
came here to say something similar. It makes no sense to store something so dangerous for so long if we have a way to reuse it AND turn it into much less material that's radioactive for orders of magnitude of less time.
As a fellow nuclear engineer, all I can say is: Perfect statement!
Nuclear should be our backbone, solar and wind which is intermittent cannot comprise our baseload that is ludicrous.
my radiation background is in another field and have an interest in nuclear power and alternative reactor types such as MSRs. Great comment, thank you!
OK, sounds awesome. And now the 1 Million Dollar question? Why aren’t we (or anyone else) doing this? And please no BS response like “Oh the greens”, or “oh politics” because there are so many countries run by all political flavors, if this is the golden bullet, at least one country would invest big money to push this forward. So why not?
An extremely concise summary of the current situation. Having worked in the industry for 20 years I’ve observed first hand both the technical challenges, but also the fundamental disconnect of a society wanting quick wins, wrestling with inter generational decisions. The result in my opinion is that we keep making bad short term decisions with very long term negative consequences, but here’s the rub, because the consequences are so long term, no one is accountable.
I appreciate the video and your perspective.
I do think that one element that was not highlighted in the video is the risk management benefits to recycling or at least better disposition of spent fuel. the American paradigm is the absolute worst.
also, the antiquated perspective that we are setting an example for anyone by not reprocessing fuel is silly. the nuclear countries mentioned who are reprocessing all have nuclear warheads. who are we setting this example for? who are the nuclear energy countries who we are fearful of acquiring weapons?
Yes we are! We are all accountable for what we do to our future generations. It's just no one feels that responsibility as much as they need to
@@trinydex There’s an SMR fast reactor project I’ve been talking to recently and they put a different spin on things. Burning spent fuel in their reactor creates an end product that in the main has a 300 year time to free release. This is genuinely interesting as when I was in Sellafield in the early 2000s they had 55,000 tonnes (not a typo) of Uranium oxide. It seems no one ever said stop when it came to recycling. So basically we’re spending escalating amounts storing the stuff when it could be burned and the end cost for storage would be much less. A final twist in the story is that we have a large store (public domain information) of Plutonium. Obviously this could be made into weapons, but the argument is that’s OK as the UK is a stable and responsible democracy. Here the question is, will the Plutonium be made into a product that can’t be made into bombs before the political situation in the U.K. declines. This is another angle on accountability. In the early 2000s again I did some work on the Geological Repository, only to be horrified to find that almost 20 years ago my older colleagues had been working on it for 30 years. As I write, there’s still no agreement on when it should be built and projects on Sellafield are 300% over budget vs 2007 estimates, and more to the point the site remains the highest hazard in Western Europe. I could go on as there have been so many interesting solutions such as Prism (probably spelt wrong, but a Pu burning reactor) which have come and gone.
Yep nobody looks past their own lifespan. Pathetic.
No people are still accountable for what they do, no matter how much time passes.
My physics prof said the biggest roadblock to replacing most fossil fuels with nuclear is not technological, but political.
😂Great, I hope he has not been fired yet
Molten salt breeder reactors have been the obvious replacement for light watercand fossil fuel generation for about 60 years...
Same thing with the leaf
But that would kill the pharmaceutical companys
These politicians are afraid that their coal and gas industry partners might stop funding their luxurious life
The biggest roadblock in humanity is not technological, but political.
Ayo bruv the current paradigm of human consumption is so inefficient
@@vincentgrinn2665
1 trillion population with 95% of the surface left for nature.
Lol dude.
You realize agriculturally used land is not land left for nature, not at all?
Let's hypothetically say we have infinite money to push efficiencies pretty close to the max we can achieve with current technology, even in that case earth can't sustain more than maybe 15 - 20 billion people.
But even that would only be achievable with intensive, large scale agriculture using up large amounts of the land suitable for agriculture, replacing the natural land and therefore displacing its flora and fauna.
Now 1 trillion or 1000 billion people, that is just ridiculous.
You have to realize that in agriculture efficiency correlates with intensity. The more intensive the agriculture, the more efficient it is, the more food/calories per square meter you can get.
However the more intensive the agriculture, the less natural it is and the less habitat it offers for the flora and fauna that used to live there before the land was converted to agricultural land.
Oh and the exact same principle applies to forestry. Forests optimized for intensive (= high efficiency) forestry are very different to natural, wild forests and offer dramatically less habitat for the flora and fauna that used to live there before we turned the forest into a high efficiency forestry optimized forest.
Let's look at a central European nation as an example. Germany right now with its current population/population density, guess how much land is not used by humans for forestry, agriculture or any other usage like buildings, infrastructure, etc., how much of the area is still wild, completely natural and left for nature?
You'll probably won't believe it, but even with the current population only *0.6* % remain that are considered to be wild, completely natural. And these 0.6% only still exist because they're strictly protected areas like national parks.
A couple of percent (can't remember the exact figure, it's roughly about 5%) of the area are considered to be at least somewhat close to its natural state.
So, 1 trillion people with 95% natural land... while right now with the current population a central European nation like Germany already has not 95% but instead only 5% left for nature, with only 0.6% being wild/completely natural...
Germany isn't the exception, other relatively densely populated nations in western/central Europe have similar figures.
Seriously, Everything is made to be disposable now. Almost impossible to fix things now. 50 years ago it was different
Oi yor raight geezer, da current paradigm ain't sustainable 🍻
Cheers
@@vincentgrinn2665 yeah right, that's why we have so much wars over land and waters
Carbon-free power should be the only options allowed for starters. Then we need to transition to precision fermentation techniques to create dairy alternatives which would replace MOST of the inefficient dairy and meat industries... Indoor farming can also be used for everything but grains basically... And all of this could be done in 100-mile zones from major cities EASILY if people put in the effort. Why? Because that's how we used to live until recently... Rarely was food imported from halfway around the world. It was all local, organic and "whole" as they say... That's probably not nearly as viable now with urbanism so we got to get creative with technology...
Kudos to the french guy for all the effort he has put into speaking in english!
Not complaining, his english is great, it's just that there is much resistance in general for the french to speak english
As a french i can say it s not so much about "resistance" rather than poorly implémented teaching of langages.
And it is getting worse recently as the school got severly underfunded under macron. Even French is poorly mastered now by newer graduates, even in elitist fields. (I often grade medical students exams, and it is a sorry sight 😅)
I'm very surprised by your point of view. To be honest, I would not go so far (like resistance). The issue is way much simpler: most of french are just bad at english… Same idea than Occam's razor.
It doesn't mean that French are not proud of their language.
He is good at Speaking English because it's the Linga franca of the scientific world, English is what he uses to speak to his colleagues all over the world.
I think he is the only one to know why he is good in English
@@etienne8110 you mean, how macron got rid of administrators and got more teachers? Lol. It's not that anyhow, it's the attitude in the schools where I've worked and the teachers saying stuff like "ton anglais est dégueulasse" to struggling students. Also, thanks to the Internet + streaming most students who want to learn English are nearly fluent.
Splendid Documentary. This is what journalism is supposed to be.
In Germany people ran Amok against the Nuclear recycling plant in Wackersdorf. Later attempts at recycling spent fuel rods drew massive protests where people chained themselves to railroad tracks to prevent nuclear recycling (Castor transports).
So the fact that it is recyclable is well known in Germany, just not wanted.
there is a saying people get the governance that they diserve, and probably the energie to:-) that being said, economicly it is questionable if recycling nucleair wast is a succes, but from the prospect of taking up responsibilty it is miles ahead compared to the oil industrie and especialy the renewable industrie.
Activist do not equate with intelligence
As long as it's outputs radiation it can be used for energy. Note the transport caskets for the waste was said be at 300°C. I fairly sure that's above boiling and therefor producing steam. We don't always have to recycle we can just use different type of reactor to take advantage of the less energetic fuel.
Germany doesn't even want France to do it. I heard that France could use much more of its existing nuclear plants but German reps keep blocking them in the EU energy council in response to demands from the anti-nuclear movement. It sounds well-intentioned but misguided
@@andrewrobb3258 Isn't steam already the same principle nuclear energy is converted in powerplants for the energy grid?
This vid is ALMOST accurate, and it still feels pretty anti-nuclear, particularly when trotting out the nuclear bomb footage. Yes, someone did make plutonium for a bomb using a CANDU reactor but NO - the reactor was not run correctly to produce electricity. It was NOT from the plutonium from spent fuel. Just because it is "plutonium" does not mean you can make bombs. It is the same problem you get trying to make bombs from natural uranium. Remember the vid mentions U235 - that in high enough concentration (typically well over 90%) makes a bomb, but a reactor runs about 4% with fresh fuel. Plutonium from reactor fuel is a wide mix of isotopes. It is NOT bomb material.
The vid also mentioned "fuel is radioactive for 100,000+ years". What it should say, is "more radioactive than the average background". When you pull out the plutonium, you are left with fission products (correct in the vid) but those decay away quickly. 300 years is enough to drastically lower the emissions. The plutonium can then be used for fuel (particularly when mixed with regular U238) as "MOX fuel".
As for those "experimental" reactors, they are called "breeders", they consume the U238 which a normal reactor can't do. Instead, the U238 is bred to a mixture of plutonium (gasp!) isotopes, or you start with thorium and breed it to U233. Both of those can be used as fuel, which is why it is said that 96% of the "spent fuel" contains energy being thrown away. The development of breeder reactors started in the 60s. Lack of funding and public fear basically halted development until about 10-20 years ago. We should soon see the results of their development.
The biggest problem with nuclear power is too few members of the public understand it. Once you learn about it, your fear drops away.
@LFTRnow one thing I disagree with is always the framing that "stupid public be so fearful".. Many things that also stopped development in breeding&recycling stopped with the The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.. Which was not stupid public, but global politics.. and the other thing is, the public is not just "stupid fearful", they lost trust. How did this happen? For example when the Windscale Brand was for many years tried to cover up. Or when Japan goverment stepped in front of camaras and deliberately lied to the public for days. (as they said, they feared panic, if they would be honest). Anyway, when honesty isn't an option you gonna lose trust.
It wasn't even a CANDU reactor; heavy water moderated and light water cooled.
And yes the fission products are much shorter-lived.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor
There is a proliferation risk involved with fuel reprocessing though, if you can extract separate isotopes you can extract Pu²³⁹
The solution to this problem is liquid fuelled reactor with a high burn up rate rather than solid fuel reprocessing.
@@MostlyPennyCat
Higher burn-up waste (from PWRs and BWRs rather than CANDU) contain a much higher percentage of Pu-240, which makes building a weapon much harder (and a fizzle more likely). Yes you could try to centrifuge it, but then the mass difference is not as great as between U-235 and U-238, plus explaining to the IAEA why your centrifuges are unusually radioactive may be challenging.
France already has nuclear bombs of various sorts so the proliferation risk is lower. Look at how uranium enrichment works; proliferation risk but managed.
Note that SHINE Technologies (of the USA) is working with Orano to develop reprocessing where the Uranium and Plutonium are kept together.
I am absolutely blown away by the fact that this is a DW contribution. Amazing job.
Such a great video. I'd happily watch it if it were 3 times the length.
This kind of content deserves a really deep dive
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Agree
I'd love to learn the more technicality of this recycling nuclear waste
The white smoke coming out of the cooling towers is water vapor, it is not radiation.
Thermal electrical power plants using gas and coal have the same cooling towers and the same white water vapor.
Nuclear power plants built along the sea do not have cooling towers,. Same goes for thermal electrical power plants powered by gas and coal.
FACT
Not only that but the smoke from a coal plant is blatantly radioactive
Did anybody claim it's "radiation"? How should this even work, given that radiation is basically impossible to see for the human eye
@@majormayer7133 There's radioactive smoke that comes out of coal plants and it's a commonly mistaken belief that nuclear plants release radiation like that.
@@majormayer7133 Nobody claimed it was radiation. Don't know what the guy is rambling about. Radiation is invisible to the eye, however, a byeffect of radiation caused by fission can be Cherenkov radiation, which looks like a faint blue glow.
this facility doesn't just recycle the nuclear waste of France, it also takes in the waste from the Netherlands and Belgium as those two countries together only have 3 plants i think
Some 10% of nuclear electricity in France today is generated by recycling materials in the form of MOX fuel, Orano said, and this can rise to 25% and to almost 40% if used MOX fuel is further recycled.
yeah makes you wonder why it's not 100% of the waste they are burying the stuff instead of suing it to make power when we need more clean power to reduce carbon emission's this mmakes me sad they arn't using all of it to make power
@@raven4k998 Because it's not possible to recycle 100%, for the moment.
You assume their Process CAN recycle the MOX Fuel...
@@HappilyHomicidalHooligan The only reason I can think of that it wouldn't is that the plutonium levels exceed some safety margin or that the remaining fissile materials are in a different combination due to the presence of the plutonium causing different reactions.
@@HappilyHomicidalHooligan We do recycle it, it's not a can.
It helps to think of nuclear fuel not as the gasoline (petrol) in your car, but rather the lubricating oil for your engine.
The oil never stops being oil, but it does accumulate carbon residue, metal shavings, dust, and other detritus, thus becoming less and less effective. (In nuclear materials - the daughter products of the decay chain can absorb neutrons and thus degrade the efficiency of the fuel assembly) At a certain point, you are going to change the oil make sure the vehicle operates efficiently.
Now what to do with this oil? Stashing it in paint cans around the garage only works for so long. Now you could run the stuff through filters and magnets to remove the particulates, then boil it in a hydrogen enriched atmosphere to refine out a new hydrocarbon substance - but that takes a lot of equipment and knowledge of chemistry. Especially if new bottles of oil are cheap and easily available - it makes very little sense to be doing this on a personal scale.
It should be noted that the supply of Uranium was very uncertain in the later 1940s and early 1950s, so there were a number of projects started for reprocessing. However, more reserves of Uranium were found and the processes for refining it became more efficient. As time went on more responsibility for power plants was transferred from government service to private companies who in turn focused on cost-cutting even more.
Unlike Russia, Canada, and the USA - France didn't have a great untapped Uranium source in an unexplored part of the country, so recycling continued to make sense to them. Their independent streak and desire to build nuclear weapons also made research into refinement/recycling lucrative.
Fyi Russia and Japan do have recycling plants too
@@cristoforestman That is a true point. I was focusing on France, as that is where the video is taking place. But we can look at some of the other countries and more interesting examples of what does or doesn't motivate the construction of these facilities.
Japan - like France - doesn't have much domestic Uranium mining and thus it was also part of a self-sufficiency plan. Furthermore, they don't have a middle of nowhere to store waste - and while I don't know much about the island's geography, I doubt they have a spot that would meet the stability requirements for a facility like Yucca Mountain.
Russia's Reprocessing plants are left-over from the Soviet Era. That of course a whole discussion of a different economic system, paranoia about importing things from the West, and a design philosophy for nuclear weapons that requires rebuilding warheads more often than some other configurations. Major releases of material from some of these plants are occasionally used as an argument against nuclear technology in general.
Britain had both a domestic nuclear weapons program, a lack of Uranium in the isles, and a harsh post-war financial situation that made the idea of charging others to handle waste seem like it could be a decent source of revenue. Even at the time people complained about the UK becoming Europe's nuclear dustbin. Also - some of the early British nuclear plants used a magnesium based fuel cladding that degraded in water, so they couldn't be left in cooling ponds for great lengths of time and thus required additional handling.
The power of cheap.
the oil is a great analogy
lubricant in combustion engine is great analogy 👍
"You don't NEED to recycle" Well while that's true I would counter with well just because you don't need to doesn't mean you shouldn't. It would make nuclear power far more attractive if we were able to produce nuclear power with less waste over time. Sometimes it's not about cost it's about doing what's the right thing to do.
Also it's an insurance in case the price of fresh Uranium rises. Right now they can get it cheap from poor countries, but what if those countries change allegiances? What if there's a coup and the new military government demand higher prices? Reusing those fuel rods can provide security and self-reliance.
There are so many common misconceptions with nuclear energy and its byproducts. Thank you for making something so informative. I hope more and more people realize how effective and clean this energy is in the future.
Misconceptions? Or paid for misinformation... One might almost think there's a competing industry that stands to lose a lot of money if they were to lose their market dominance so they invested in displacing a variety of other industries (trains, nuclear etc)
Our Rejection of Nuclear Power was a Huge mistake, and the environment has payed dearly for it as we continue to rely on fossil fuels for our electricity
Some countries were more against nuclear than others, and some still are (Germany)
It all stemmed from the fear of just the word “nuclear” because of nuclear weapons. Many people unfortunately still believe a nuclear reactor is just a bomb waiting to blow.
@@erickgomez7775Germany is paying the price
Exactly
It is more the rejection of renewable energy sources. Nuclear Power ist just a pricy step in between.
And as for Germany. We are through with it.
I makes no sense at all to build it up for the future again. Not for nature and especially not for profits.
Yes, we could had have used it longer. But this decision window is long gone.
Storing it for when the price goes up. Smart! This is a clever implementation of recycling
I love that in the end nuclear power is still steam power with more steps :D
That was a great documentation, I didnt know France made such an effort in recycling nuclear waste
yes true, almost al the electricity is produced this way
Wild guess: Money
*because it's not profitable
And a large chunk of that money would likely be due to risk management from handling tonnes of nuclear waste to separate the desirable irradiated stuff from the undesirable stuff, then having to handle the concentrated radioactive waste on one hand and safely handling the fissile stuff on the other.
One major problem with recovering fissile materials from waste is that everything needs to be processed in batches small enough to never come anywhere near critical mass. Can't just throw a ton of nuclear fuel in a crucible and process it all at once since there is a risk U235 or Pu239 could settle at the bottom without active stirring and go critical. Got to split it in loads that will never contain 56kg of U235 or equivalent after de-rating for other fissile isotopes in the input waste.
Too many things can go wrong if you try to be cost-effective about it.
yes but as always it is because the financial system currently doesn't account for environmental damage and cleanup. that is why we still are dumping vast amounts of garbage into landfills instead of reusing the materials: it is somebody else's problem - probably our children's or children's children's who can later clean it all up. as crazy as it sounds the GDP actually goes up if we pollute an area and then clean it up and restore it to the state it was before.
Different goals between France (sustainable and long term government strategies) and the US which is about short-term quarterly profit taking... Nuclear doesn't work like that. It has hydro-like upfront costs and lifecycles. So be prepared to spend tons up front for long-term gains... Something antithetical to American life in 2024...
@@thedoctor.a.s1401ua-cam.com/video/cbeJIwF1pVY/v-deo.htmlsi=5WjMwNtDzzuB2EIL no, the other way around
It just doesn't make sense to constantly create more waste when we have ways of reusing it.
13:25 When she said the materials used to recycle nuclear "waste" "generate alot of waste" I knew she was biased. Because all the nuclear "waste" Sweden has ever produced can fit a parking lot. Nuclear "waste" is the least pollutant and most space efficient byproduct of electricity generation.
i mean this is a german channel what do you expect, better excavate half the german countryside for coal rather than a stadium's worth to store waste spent rods lol
@@nousername8162 Funny thing is a stadium's worth of store would be the amount of nuclear waste made in like 50 years, and then you'd have descendants hunting for this nuclear waste to use in more efficient nuclear reactors.
@@nousername8162 Except, Allison Macfarlane used to work for the *US Nuclear Regulatory Comission* (minute 8:19 onwards), and not the German equivalent. And she has a point about the recycling process generating more waste, if you consider that the byproducts of the chemical reactions used to seperate the fission product, and then seperate plutonium from uranium needs to go somewhere as well. Since this is just a brief and simplified overview of the process, we don't know which chemicals are beig used for the seperation steps, nor what the byproducts are and what danger they may or may not pose to humans and the environment. But I bet, Allison Macfarlane does, since she has worked with nuclear energy, and subsequently also with nuclear waste and what to do with it.
I saw an evil greed in her eyes
Thanks, very informative. It is very complex, here in the UK we abandoned recycling at Sellafield, this video helps me understand why.
Not really. The UK abandoned recycling at Sellafield because it fucked up. The plant was a badly run catastrophe.
Magnox stopped reprocessing in 2022 because it finished reprocessing all of the magnox fuel, it finished its 60 year job and thus closed? It was hardly abandoned
Again see my similar reply Magnox stopped reprocessing in 2022 because it finished reprocessing all of the magnox fuel, it finished its 60 year job and thus closed. Are you confusing sellafield ltd with the seperate company magnox?
15:25 15:25 Recycling should always be part of the foundation of production. Self efficient for replication should always be priority for pure value and essence of progress for economics. No production of factories processes should be built without priority of recycling in 21 century. Recycling should be a priority before maintenance because the foundation is production. Fixing a problem maintains the problem of fixing. Recycling removes maintenance cycles and simply starts again from a element prospective. Prioritising production. Fixing slows production in essence and one can be removed essentially with no waste of time for machine process time. Recycling has to be priority in production in 21 century. Time and speed is achieved with recycling and production not production and maintenance for a product. It's more efficient to replace than fixing a product the machine should be a loop of element recycling at heart of energy of the product. Weather it's new or old always recycle item back in the loop process, from a elementary part. Self efficient factorys can only be achieved with recycling as part of arctechture of factory from start to finish of manufacture production of a factory design.15:25 15:25
*people forget the other R's. reduce, reuse. that hot pod could heat a building.*
LOL. Yeah, but how many of them would be stolen? People can't be trusted. There are lots of things we COULD do if people could be trusted.
it could heat a thousand homes in a reactor tho
@@hmeric7495 how much energy will it take to reprocess; build, maintain, operate power plants; maintain electrical grid; convert heat to electricity, transmit, and convert back to heat?
@@juzeus9 yeah you're right
@@juzeus9 Not much, in the grand scheme of things. Radioisotope Thermal Generators already exist. They last for years, and the only 'maintenance' required, is cooling. So to a normal household, they can provide both electricity and heating at the same time.
15:15 - Is there any way to harvest energy from the heat / radiation of the waste? similar to an RTG?
It's exactly what I was wondering when I saw it: 2:25
Russia still uses RTGs in super remote parts of Siberia. Look it up, pretty crazy. A bunch of them have gone missing over the years.
That would litterally be an rtg, an rtg dont need a specific kind of radioactive material but different kinds can be used for different purposes, for example some fuels give a lot of power over a "short" period while others give more during a longer period. So yes, you could make an rtg.
However in a stationary plant it would probably be more effective to just use a cooling cycle that uses a different kind of cooling medium, aka the heat vapourising a liquid which drives a turbine
Not in any meaningful quantity. The fuel is very hot yes but it doesn't actually have much in the way of heat generation and they heat up rather slowly.
@@naberville3305 Hmm, well it wouldn't need to be a TON -- but I feel just hooking up a case lined with Peltier devices could be beneficial -- but might not be worth the cost ROI for the energy they generate.
Your videos just keep getting better and better! This one was fantastic. 👌
Its not bad that we aren't immediately recycling it, becasue it is always available for future recycling. And it's easier to recycle once it has cooled down for a while.
It cools down once radioactivity dies out. Also meaning that some of the interesting isotopes decayed...
@@etienne8110 Not the ones relevant to power generation.
Wait... We don't use the radioactive part of the fuel for power generation?
@@SeriousDrazhar The isotopes that may decay on human timescales are not Uranium 235 or Plutonium relevant to power generation. They have half lives from hundreds of thousands of years to billions of years.
@@SeriousDrazhar the dangerously radioactive isotopes are far too unstable to actually use for power, there is a reason we don't use Caesium or Iodine isotopes for power despite them being insanely radioactive, they are too unstable. uranium is great because it's just radioactive enough to get hot while still being pretty stable to work with for many years.
You should be Proud of your work!!! I would like to thank EVERYONE taking part in this video! MERCI for the message you are spreading!!! And ofcourse........Viva la France!!!!!!!!
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I always love how almost all of our power generation is "turn a turbine" with different media
Yeah. It’s just conversion of energy. Chemical to mechanical to electrical for nuclear energy production. If we can harness energy 100 percent, idk if that’s possible, it would be nice.
Because turbines have most effective conversion factors. So naturally that thing is used when possible.
Only solar panels truly found a different way to a turbine.
I mean, spinning a magnet is basically the only way to directly generate AC, so yeah, we need to turn a turbine
@tschiyo7473 If heat could directly transform into power we would probably be harvesting geothermal spot and deep pits for about a thousand dollars with almost 0 waste
It'd also break the laws of thermodynamics killing us all but it'd be Nice
@@emilwandel You can go directly from thermal to electricity with RTG's. USSR used them as remote power stations, and NASA uses them to power space probes where solar won't work. Zero moving parts. Not a lot of power output though.
The waste I'm concerned about isn't the dry cask storage reactor waste. It's the Cold War era leftover waste from building nuclear weapons that was improver stored or disposed of. Some of it has just been dumped into lakes and into the ocean in steel drums. Some of it is just capped with concrete on an island in the Pacific Ocean, with waves slowly eroding the concrete away.
i'm more concerned about the 40 some nukes that have gotten lost over the years.
I'm not sure where you're getting these ideas from. When we decommission a nuclear weapon, the fissile material has never been thrown away, it's just turned into fuel rods for power plants. Sure there's plenty of waste from the refining and enrichment of uranium, but that's a chemical waste problem, not a radiation problem. You should be equally upset about any mining and processing operations that were done back before environmental regulations. Nothing special about nuclear weapons in that respect.
@iankrasnow5383 Look up: Lake Karachay, Runit island. For two examples. For more, read the wiki on ocean disposal of radioactive waste.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste#:~:text=The%20waste%20materials%20included%20both,been%20banned%20by%20international%20treaties.
@@iankrasnow5383 that's BS. nuclear weapons grade enrichment is way too high for a reactor.
people should be more concerned about the waste generated by coal power plants : little to almost nobody talks about all the radioactive particles naturally contained in coal that get released in the air along with the smoke in the burning process, which adds to heavy metals, toxic arsenic and all the rest of the good stuff that contribute to kill thousands of people every year worldwide. (compared to less than 1 per year on average for nuclear...)
My impression was that the fuel rods themself make up a very small amount of the waste. Consumables, like gloves, clothing, cleaning supplies, old pumps are what fills the vast majority of those barrels. and those aren't going away just because you keep reusing the fuel. Re-using the fuel reduces the load on uranium mines, and I guess that's good.
Yes it's recyclable, this is why we shouldn't dispose of it. The longer it sits, the easier it is to recycle. So leave the casks sit until we need the nuclear waste / fuel in the future. Because we will need it in the future.
Is it really easier to recycle? You'd think that the fissile isotopes decay away, no?
@@haldir108 pretty sure I recall uranium has an insanely long half life. Longer than humanity has been around.
@xiphoid2011 Yes, it does. That's why uranium still exists on this planet from when it was created.
@haldir108 The fission products do decay away the most dangerous isotopes have the shortest half lives. The longer it sits, the less fission products exist. But some of the products take hundreds of thousands of years to decay away to safe levels.
The responsible thing is to recycle it and take the worst and scariest energy/waste parts and reuse it for good... But even the scariest parts aren't at all as you see in the video.. Just really safe and simple techniques that have been around for decades... France should partner with other nations and open co-venture regional factories for recycling around the world... Like 1 in North America, 1 in China, 1 in Eastern Europe for example... As part of the deal they could guarantee France gets the Plutonium as a safety feature just to make sure...
Love your videos DW!! Keep em coming. So much appreciation for your work to help us understand important and interesting things with accurate information. It's so important these days.
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I am deeply impressed that our German DW made a somewhat unbiassed report about this topic although usually our state-run media ridiculously follow the green antinuclear policy.
Nuclear + renewables would have been the key for sustainable, climate friendly energy supply until nuclear fusion is ready.
More industry nations should have done it like France, of course also including nuclear fuel recycling to minimize the amount of waste that accumulates.
That said, of course while France does very well with nuclear, they're a little bit behind in terms of renewables. The share of energy from coal, gas and oil could have been already replaced with renewables by now.
I cannot emphasize enough how false hope of nuclear fusion being practical one day is. It will never happen. It takes approximately three thousand times as much energy to produce the pure (enough) Deuterium-Tritium mix it takes to initiate fusion of a pair of these isotopes, no guarantee more than a few fractions of a percent of these isotopes will react, and no hope for a stable contained fusion reaction that provides more electricity than it takes to initiate, contain, and maintain.
China produces five new nuclear reactors worth of solar PV a week. With TWEST, old nuclear and fossil generating stations can be converted to effectively store enough solar power to supply need on demand when the sun doesn't shine, at low cost and without using fuel.
Most of it pretty much is already replaced. They're only using tiny amounts of natural gas for high load, and of course diesel generators for remaining off-grid uses. The last coal plant is basically just for extra heat & electricity demand (and dwindling solar supply) during winter. Plus they're already taking excess wind and solar power from Germany.
Nuclear fission power generation is not in any way "sustainable" and nuclear fusion power generation is a pipe dream that will never be viable.
Being hopeful about fusion strikes me as odd. What advantages does fusion have that fiission doesn't? Will it be cleaner, cheaper, safer, more space efficient, easier to finance, or otherwise better in a technical, economic, or environmental way? It seems unlikely to me. It might be less politically divisive, but as far as i can tell, that's the most significant advantage.
@@haldir108 Leaving aside that practical fusion power will remain impossible, its advantages as dreamed of by those unconstrained by reality are rooted in its greater power and lesser radiation contamination. Tritium and isotopes of lithium have very short half lives and/or low radioactive signature, and fusion reactions generate 17 MeV per event, far more than fission can claim. So, arguably cleaner, except not really. It takes fission to produce tritium cost-effectively, unless you use lithium exposed to fusion reactions, so you'll likely always need fission if you have fusion, so 'as clean as' is the best you can get. Not cheaper, either, for the same reasons. Safer, arguably, but again not really. Easier to finance, as let's face it there's one born every minute. Better for militaries, since it defrays the cost of overhead for making h-bombs.
I could never understand why nuclear waste exist. If the problem is that it has so much energy left that it's radioactive at a dangerous level surely if possible to transform taught power into electricity or heat by using a different method like a PV cell tuned to the wave length of that radiation or using to heat something with a lower boiling point than water
Actually not a bad idea, though I guess the problem is that utilities think in terms of turbines and turbine efficiency is largely influenced by the temp gradient, which is much lower in the case of "beta decay heated" waste than fissile stff in a reactor. So they just keep the spent fuel at site and let it decay in a pool contributing some to the plant power output.
I think a big part of the misunderstanding is that there are 2 kinds of nuclear waste (actually 3 if you also consider depleted uranium from enrichment). There is nuclear fission product and there are unfissioned parts / transuranics (e.g. plutonium). Nuclear reprocessing is about separating these 2 kinds from each other. The unfissioned parts / transuranics get recycled into new fuel and recycling (if it's actually done) destroys that kind of waste. The fission products get stored. The fission products are the main problem here: they're radioactive enough and mobile enough in the environment to cause a giant mess if they were ever to escape storage, but their power is extremely low compared to the power obtained from fission (nuclear waste containers are often air-cooled). And with current technology, there is no way to speed up the radioactive decay to make the radioactivity go away faster. So they need to be stored for something like 1 Million years, which is a timeline where e.g. erosion of mountain ranges has to be accounted for.
@@SASAS-ru8ys Fission products by themselves go aways pretty fast. For the most part the fp returns to background lvl in about 300 year or so.
@@SASAS-ru8ys Molten Salt Reactors can split long-lived radioactive elements into short-lived ones that can be safely stored (half-life up to 300 years), uranium-235, uranium-238, plutonium 239, 240 and 241, which can be reused as fuel
@@CraftyF0X 300y is still way to long considering politics already have problems planning out the next term. These timespans are too long for humans to handle properly.
That's a good video
It's good to eradicate the misconception about nuclear energy in sociecity
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Thing is you can use waste for fuel like a Matrioshka doll
Spend uranium rods>extract plutonium>make MOX>Extract thorium> Thorium salt reactor>Fast neutron reactor> RTG
Yeah, have multiple types of reactors, and have a well-connected fuel supply chain across different types of reactors.
Canada doesn't even use fresh fuel that much, they mostly interested in USA leftovers.
you frogot to say that this doesn't exist
Why doesn’t this have more view? This is extremely important knowledge in preventing fear of nuclear power.
It causes waste that will pollute for thousands of years
Fascinating video and I have a question, not sure if you can answer. The big drums used for transport. Noticed they are essentially heat spreaders. How much heat is "externally" released by the waste? Could the shielding be reduced to increase the heat being released and still block the harmful radiation?
What I am thinking is could that decay of the waste be harnessed with a generator using a Sterling Engine and the heat being radiated used for the power of that engine? You mentioned that the water cooling takes 5 years, how long would that heat exists without the water cooling in a radiator style container?
If this is viable it would be an amazing use for some of the material.
Press like if you had intrusive thought of swimming in there 4:11💀
Thats how u becoming super hero
you'd actually be fine, just don't dive to the bottom.
@@redwithblackstripesxkcd?
That's a job you can actually get if you want
@@redwithblackstripesyou'd still probably be fine if you were there for only a brief moment. The time of exposure means a lot for an acute dose. 10 seconds could be safe, but 3 minutes could mean severe ARS. Just drop your bare nutsack on it and tell your friends a cool story.
This was very interesting. Thanks!
Thanks for the info! New follower here from Manila Philippines.
German journalist talking to a French scientist in English, love to see it. As an ESL speaker, I'm fully on board with everyone using a lingua franca, it's efficient af.
Excelent docu. It has answered me so many questions I had.
Thank you for an excellent article. One important point you did not mention is that fast reactors can burn the transuranics inside the reactor during the regular operation. This would be preferable and much work has already been done on these designs.
Very nice documentary, thank you DW for educating the world, 1 video at the time. Hope you always successful all the way to the future.
Thanks for the feedback! Stay tuned for this Friday as we have a video coming out on Supergrid.🌞
Thank you for this information!
This explains why some countries reprocess spent fuel. However, calling it 'recycling' is inaccurate as fission is a linear, irreversible process, not a circular one. Chemical reprocessing enables more complete use of fissile material, not reuse of it after use.
Why aren't we recycling it? Two words, no profits.
Why recycle when people who are paid pennies and have poor legal protections in the workplace can just dig up more for us?
I'm sure it's a coincidence that those people doing the digging are often various shades of brown.
let me complete this : no SHORT TERM profits. which is the only thing free market cares about.
@@Phyz7 AND, WHO IS PAYING FOR THE CLEANUP, AFTERWARDS?!
Cleanup what? Few hundred tons of material a year that can be safely contained and returned to the ground where it came from or a few billion tons of gasses pumped into the atmosphere?
Unholy alliance between greens and traditional energy lobby, with assist from militaries that don't like how some of the safer reactor designs don't produce weapons-grade material
Where can I see the full PowerPoint NOT sped up?
Figuring out how to secure plutonium seems like a better route than burying waste for 10,000 years.
We could make nuclear batteries, lasting about 136000 years (theoretically), but the only problem is 3 things:
1) consumers
2) people who throw batteries in fires
3) requiring a thin sheet of true diamonds on a consumer scale, which I think isn’t cheap at all and the nuclear waste.
Great video!
I did an undergrad paper on this about 40 years ago. Ted Ringwood and others came up with synroc in the late '70s after learning that the fission products in the Oklo natural reactor in Gabon of about 2 bya had barely mirgrated in that time. Its radioative loading is about 4-5x that of the best glasses with the advantages that they are stable at much higher temperatures and have porosity rates a couple of orders lower than the glasses. Drill into an unfractured-by-glaciation granite pluton about 1 km below the Canadian shield, bury, backfill with self-healing bentonite clays and you're gtg for several million years. The recoverable energy in Ontario's pools was worth about $300 B in '80s dollars by about 10 years ago and it would've cost about $5-10 B to do it all. Still, a 30-60x payback can't cut it when it involves the transport of weapons-grade Pu through populated areas. The French are so French ;-)
To save you 15 mins: Due to cost, technology, and security concerns.
"There's plenty of uranium, it's not necessary to recycle." How does that sound so familiar? Oh yeah, "There's plenty of oil, it's not necessary to spare it." But instead of just investing in recycling the spent nuclear fuel, I think we need either thorium based plants and/or better power grids and grid scale energy storage for renewables.
Nothing that broken wetware defect said is accurate. Individuals such as that are the entire reason so much is going wrong. Theft of oxygen should be illegal.
Im for Power grid and Renewable is way cheaper
@@MadScientist267 I think her comment is being taken out of context.
The complexity and cost is very high relative to mining virgin uranium hence there's no reason [financial incentive] to recycle.
Everything she said is accurate.
@@shawnsg Until someone comes up with an excuse for something that isn't "costs too much", I don't want to hear it anymore. Goes for everything. Enough is enough.
Talking about better power grids and thorium - did you already watch these videos from us? 😎
"This is what's REALLY holding back wind and solar"
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"Can thorium nuclear energy make a comeback?"
👉 ua-cam.com/video/Km6kqykX900/v-deo.html
Thanks for making this video. It was very interesting.
9:58 thats what she said
If it ever becomes economically feasible; the Sun, Venus, and Jupiter would be ideal places to dump our nuclear waste.
I worked on the Sellafield Nuclear reprocessing plant in the UK back in the mid 1980's (operated by BNFL). There were two reprocessing projects, Magnox and Thorp. That place has been online, reprocessing nueclear fuel since the mid 1970's - 50 years now.
5:30 Wait…. All these years and we’re still basically running off of steam engines…..😅
Steam is the most efficient.
"You can also use plutonium from from commercial reactors"
Only if they have low burnup and online refuelling, both of which harm the economics of the nuclear reactor (such as a British MAGNOX or RBMK)... But inside a light water reactor... the plutonium generated is reactor grade, not weapons grade. It cannot explode and cannot be centrifuged into weapons grade due to radiation from Pu-240.... Much like the recyclable waste from a Thorium reactor, turning it into weapons grade means handling it and handling it would microwave you.
Also Fission products only need 300 years of storage... not thousands.... In fact this video is just typical German misinformation carefully packaged as balanced journalism... it isn't.
The "reactor grade" plutonium with all its multiple heavy Pu isotopes when accumulated for a few years actually can detonate. The problem is that if you concentrate it enough so it can happen then stability gets so poor that it eventually just goes off on its own. This results in a very large and complex and still not very reliable nuclear bomb with poorly predictable yield but if you want to go nuclear no matter the cost then in theory it can be done.
@@Kirillissimus Weapons grade is >90% Pu-239, reactor grade can explode at 80% with some trickery that isn't open information, but a spent fuel rod is less than 50% Pu-239.
So no it cannot explode, it can fissile out and microwave anyone who tries to handle it, due to the spontaneous fission rate of Pu-240. But this won't make it explode.
👍🏻thank you for this, very informative
For the same reason we don't recycle the vast majority of waste.
Cost. Without watching the video I'm saying it's because it's cheaper to use new fuel instead of reuse the old one. Let's see if I was right.
p.s. Yeah, it was mostly that. The extra waste from the chemicals needed for the recycling and the danger of having to deal with the plutonium was interesting aspect though.
Actually its the technology.
After quite a time passed and better tech and efficiency it is very much viable and scalable.
yes just like plastic, li battery, glass, metal, recycle is always most expensive
"Too cheap to meter" was the biggest lie :(
@@georgelionon9050 the only thing that's actually too cheap to meter, yet still metered, is water
@@erkinalp heh, yeah, at at least in my country tough since canal dues are priced over water intake..
I wonder if it would be viable to use the fission products in small scale RTG's.
Funny how when anyone else has a chance to have nuclear bombs America thinks it's dangerous but when America has it its like they are angels?? When they are the devils
Any form of "waste" will eventually become a problem, only a full cycle system that is sustainable..
That sense, nuclear waste is literally impossible to reuse :D but the waste of it will stop being a problem after like 300 years if we can constrain it to just fission products and use the rest.
@@CraftyF0X There's also long-lived fission products that take much longer than 300 years to decay. One key reason why I'm pretty critical about nuclear power is that during 70 years of nuclear power, we haven't seen any actor that stepped up to properly close the fuel cycle. I.e. 1) transuranics get completely (not just the plutonium part) burned up as nuclear fuel. 2) fission products get treated in such way (e.g. by transmutation) that only stable isotopes remain after, let's say 100 years 3) depleted uranium becomes fuel, not nuclear waste. Easier and cheaper carbon-free power sources are available right now; I won't wait for nuclear power to maybe possibly "soon" get its sh*t together.
So we keep burning oil so the rich can keep getting richer and our planet becomes a sweat box
Depends on the definition of "sustainable". There are estimates that if all available nuclear fuel would be used to its full extent, it could last hundred of thousands, if not millions of years. It's a bit like saying renewables are not sustainable, because their energy comes from a huge nuclear reactor is space that will inevitably run out of fuel in a couple billion years. Yes, theoretically, but that's really not our problem now.
@@NeovanGoth i agree, there is no such thing as "sustainable" forever.. even the sun will eventually go kaput..
and yes it's not our problem "now"..
but we are not talking about a couple billions or millions of years here..
the waste will become a problem in a few generation time.. just for argument sake, there are family who have grand grand children.. and we already transporting nuclear waste to other countries..
especially if we just storing the waste like this video say.. waste from 1 nuclear power for 1 year already takes so much space.. think about it if we use it for hundred of thousand of years..
they must think of something so the waste will be cycled back to nature, storage is not a solution.. no matter how big the storage is.. expand it as big as you can, it will only delay the inevitable.. if you keep filling it up, one day it will take no more..
so any waste that become a problem under a millennia .. since this is nuclear waste we talking about.. it is a significant problem to human population, let alone the risk of "stupid" people digging those back up.. you might say impossible, but from what i learn.. there is no such thing as to far, in human's stupidity and greed..
Thank you very informative!
Nuclear power is the future, would you rather have one warehouse full of nasty stuff that needs security, or an entire planet full of poison gas?
I'd rely on the sun and wind. Because that's not only clean but also unbeatably cheap.
@@Zierfish ah yes instead of paying for one facility, let's use unreliable power sources and unrealistic pipe dreams, that's way more sane.
@@DommTom and unreliable, the cost goes up massively when you consider the need for batteries or other means of energy storage and the increased logistical burden on the power grid, and nuclear is cheaper in the long run it's just expensive to build initially.
@@cageybee7221 The price of batteries is falling massively and the burden on the power grid is not a bigger problem than nuclear energy being extremly unflexible. And nuclear energy isn't cheaper long term, actually the opposite. Long term is where the true costs lie. Consider deconstruction and decontamination in accordance with security standards and you'll see that nuclear energy just loses the competition. There are reasons why the number of global reactors has remained stagnant since the 1990s while renewables have been on the rise more than anything else.
www.ecosia.org/images?addon=chrome&addonversion=6.0.3&q=anzahl%20weltweiter%20atomreaktoren#id=9B9F98950AAA2C03EB057C97438D7E8F486F7B8A
@@Zierfish One of the points of reprocessing is that the volume of material stored reduces five-fold, and that material needs to be stored for a few hundred years. At that point sticking it in the ground (probably in a new facility in a salt mines) becomes viable. 500 years versus 100k years is a reduction in risk by several orders of magnitude.
Special shout out to Canada for kicking off the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan which then enabled North Korea.
Explain?
@@johndc2998 Canada have the nuclear technology to India. Started with a research reactor and then the ability to process plutonium from the Candu reactor.
This terrified the Pakistanis which then developed their own bomb and later fold the technology to North Korea.
Yeah Canada!
@larrydugan1441 Don't blame Canada for the crazy irrational rivalry between India and Pakistan.
@@h8GW I won't give car keys and alcohol to a 16 year old for a night on in the town.
That's what Canada did.
@@h8GW
Canada didnt cause the rivalry but they did give one side a large stick without any regard to the consequences.
The rocks we were getting out of the ground was called blue stone. It's very hard. There was a lot of science that went into making it, we was only allowed to have 4 broken faces on the rocks, so they locked into each other
Our new president here in my country is an environmental scientist. If she doesn't do anything about our "normal" waste here then we're absolutely doomed.
Lucky you.😊
What country is that? 🥁
@@DWPlanetA México.
@@DWPlanetA México and I tried to explain to you more but political correctness sh.. removed my comment.
@@Wsly-bo4uv Not that lucky. I hate to be a pessimist but she will be like the one we have right now. His term ends this year. She's just his puppet.
Nuclear energy is very efficient and eco-friendly but general population don't understand how it works . More research needs to be done though.
I agree
It's not even about money, the world gives the oil industry 1 trillion dollars of subsidies each year. For that kind of money we would be able to develop fusion.
BINGO!!!!!
@@gaim44 Nixon wanted to build enough nuclear power plants that if he got the number of plants he wanted we would produce 2x the total power the USA produces in it's entirety with nuclear power alone.
You can reprocess the nuclear was 4 or 5 times, then drill a deep bore hole and bury the waste a few miles under the surface.
With that many nuclear power plants everything would be standardized and you could do things such as revitalize Appalachia by building the reactor equipment down there.
You would use the nuclear power plant manufacturing industry to do launch a science equivlant of silican valley such as
reactor manufacturing, waste processing, nuclear medicine isotope & CAT scanner manufacturing, nuclear research such as particle colliders.
Then you would do other science things such regular medical R&D to build on top of the STEM infrastructure.
You could transform Appalachia into the Netherlands such as a massive golf cart & bike trail network for eldery and teens to get the teens out & healthy socializing with peers.
often heard and everytime it is a false statement, the oil industrie is profitable, more over the taxes that are put upon oil derivatives are mindblowing, and even then they are stil competitif, so please no more oil subsidies bs! currently we do not know the limits of fossil fuels, if there are other energie sources that are better, everyone wil turn to them, no need to force them to people like the renewables these days, the only thing that is competitif to fossil fuels at the moment is nucleair energie, the present pwr technologie or the future technologies like molten salt thorium , fusion reactors have great potetials, if they would be accesable.
Fusion needs a source of neutrons to make tritium and it makes waste. It also produces high level radioactive waste (excess neutrons). The heat exchange process is problematic as U235 or Pu239 fission plants.
Do you think the oil companies would let the government invest in nuclear energy...lol.. its all about profit baby.
indeed they prefer to invest in green energy so they can tap into the bankaccounts of the midlleclas people from the western world.
Now I get it (mainly the Plutonium recovery risk). Thanks for simple explanation.
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2:39 common last words in a nuclear plant
I highly doubt that
French and English speakers have such a hard time speaking each others language well.
@@missano3856 I speak American 🇺🇸
when rich, nuclear countries can just print money, seems like printing money to recycle your nuclear waste is a much better idea than printing money when everyone got sick...
Great Video! I've heard of France's nuclear waste recycling, but it's great to see it in operation.
fission products
Those fission products, I think, are the biggest problem, besides the plutonium. These are the split halves of the atoms.
Specifically, a U235 nucleus, has 92 protons and the rest neutrons. It's really too big to be stable. All elements up to Lead have stable nuclei (nucleuses) (except for Tc and Pm). Now, Protons and Electrons attract, those are positive and negative charges, that's electrical. Protons and Neutrons also attract, using 'the strong force' or quantum chromodynamics (big complex topic that I don't even understand). Now, that force is WAY WAY more powerful, but it only works over short distances. Like 100,000 times smaller, the size of a tiny nucleus at the center of an atom. So, your average Carbon atom's nucleus, C12, 6 protons and 6 neutrons, is perfectly happy. Despite the fact that the 6 protons are all repelling each other, like crazy.
study up! Don't read all of this, just the introductions:
different kinds of atoms: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table
each kind of atom has many isotopes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope
nucleus of atoms: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_nucleus
chart of all isotopes of all elements: www-nds.iaea.org/relnsd/vcharthtml/VChartHTML.html
So a U235 nucleus is too big - so big, that the protons on one side of the nucleus repel the protons on the other side, and the two sides are farther apart so the Strong force is weaker. It's barely hanging on. It's actually stretched to egg shape, ready to break in two.
So, in a reactor, a neutron comes flying along and smacks this nucleus, and it breaks in two - that's fission. It's violent, and the results are kindof random: you usually get a big piece and a small piece. The small piece is usually some nucleus between weight 80 and 105, and the big piece is usually some element weight 128 to 150. (See periodic chart, above, and look for atomic weights, not atomic numbers.) And each can be a number of different isotopes (see chart of isotopes, above), most of which are highly radioactive. HIGHLY radioactive. And, you get a random scattering, like jellybeans spilled on the floor.
The most dangerous are the ones with short halflives. Each atom will spit out an electron. If its halflife is 1 hour, then half of the electrons get spit out in 1 hour; almost all in the first day after splitting. If the halflife is 1 year, then half are spit out over a year, and almost all over 20 years - much slower. If the halflife is 1 second, then you'll see almost all of them spit out in a minute. And, some of them do have a halflife of 1 second. So this can be an enormous number of electrons, causing an enormous amount of damage to flesh, or steel, or almost anything.
These fission products are the most radioactive substances on earth. You've heard of radioactive stuff that glows in the dark? This is the stuff that glows in the dark. (Plutonium? eh, not so much. 24,000 year halflife.) This is why, in the video, you saw the fresh fuel rods being kept in a cooling room for '5 to 7 years', before they even try to do anything with them.
How very unsurprising that France is the leader in doing the right thing
Like having colonies in Africa?
@elchicovip01 It should've been Quebec 2
The right thing? They steal it from central African countries
@@longiusaescius2537 Thr french don't like to mix with their subjects.
@@elchicovip01 The other part
After seeing videos about the work going into preventing future generations from digging up nuclear waste sites in the far future, I have to wonder if there will be a problem with people raiding these sites intentionally for recyclable material, in the same way people break into abandoned buildings for copper wire.
It's so expensive because basically everything that is in contact with this highly radioactive waste is consider radioactive waste as well.
WAR kills millions but its profitable..lol
Not to mention all of the many, many layers of regulations, permits, re-permits, re-re-permits, public objections getting more credence than science, and the years of lawyer time you have to pay to swim through all of that process.
THEN you get to overpay the contractors who are "the only ones qualified" because the process has driven competing companies out of the business, and the expertise is aging out.
Let us not forget cost overruns, government fines for not meeting unrealistic deadlines, interest on loans...
It doesn't remain radioactive for long
@@growtocycle6992 indeed but of course for manny it remains radioactif indefenatly and burns through the earts crust in minits🙂
@@MonkeyJedi99 thats if you let greens in! al your thoughts asside you see that in France they get it done, you seen the other country's as wel, and they forgot to mention Belgium we stil have 4 Gw/h of nucleair capacity, much more then manny other country's that is also served in the MOX program from Le Hague.
There's always a final storage site that never happens.
Watching the world go bye...
I took me a while to understand what you meant
Yucca Mountain, USA.... Deep River or Eliot Lake here in Canada... Only Finland has opened one last year successfully and their waste issue is tiny compared to the rest of the world especially the USA...
there is a good probability there is no need to ever put stuf in final storage exept that 4%, but if you look one way, if one vieuws there are no alternatifs, we would stil live in caves, would that be better?
Always good to see a jorno who is not in the pocket of big oil and gas
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This nuclear waste will be the poor man's electricity in the future.
Banning nuclear energy was one the biggest stupidity of Germany.
Honest to God it was the epitome of brain rot short term thinking
@@conceptsound5germany loves short term thinking
I don't think so. Nuclear energy ist one of the most expensive energy. Why use, when you can get it cheaper from wind and solar?
@@ThomasK. wind and solar maybe cheaper … at least by now, and the power density (MW/ha) is 100x smaller in solar / wind .. it takes too much useful land not mentioned that solar will also need a cleaning cycle. We need all options open.
Atleast France is talking about this. We're all the worst at handling our waste and as is the way "awareness" is step 1. Admitting you're F'd up is the best part in the healing process.
Germany's anti-nuclear phobia has caused so much damage to the envirnoment.
Hey there! We actually tackled Germany's nuclear exit when it happened 👉ua-cam.com/video/eWuGP_aBoYg/v-deo.html
The anti-nuke attitude really did a lot of damage to the environment 😢
I talked to a guy from a National lab. We’d still need permanent storage for that now really radioactive remainder.
It’s also very expensive, currently much more expensive than mining.
Germany hates nuclear reactors, but loves cheap french nuclear energy 🙃
Cheap because of government subsidies
@@KarenTookTheKidsBut isn’t everything like that in France?
Joke aside, providing unlimited, clean energy might be a decent role for a government.
the problem is though that only 3% of the volume of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is spent fuel that might be able to be reprocessed. The other 97% is stuff like machinery parts, personal protective gear etc that has been contaminated and other low grade radioactive stuff that isn't nearly as radioactive but is still dangerous and needs careful storage because it could still be used by terrorists to create dirt bombs etc, and you don't want any of it getting into the environment and food chain, because long term exposure to it will still kill you.
What are the zr cooling rods doing for recycling?