How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Waste
Вставка
- Опубліковано 9 лип 2024
- How dangerous is nuclear waste? What are we doing with it? What should we do with it? How long do I have to wait until I can cuddle with it and watch a movie together? Grab your geiger counter and jump into this cinematic journey to answer all the questions about with the world's most mysterious byproduct.
Easiest way to join/fund the Decouple movement at: / decouple
CHAPTERS
00:00 Hanging out with nuclear waste
01:50 What is the high-level waste?
02:50 E=MC2
03:17 How deadly is used fuel when it comes out of the reactor?
04:02 Danger vs Risk: Why the waste has never killed anyone
06:47 The engineering of keeping us safe
08:19 How much waste is there?
09:34 Nuclear waste vs. waste of other electricity sources
11:37 How long is the waste dangerous for?
14:53 How long ’til you can safely cuddle with nuclear waste and watch a film?
17:24 Moving the waste from the plant to the burial site (DGR)
18:23 A visit to the giant waste hole (DGR)
21:49 Nuclear waste vs other toxic wastes
22:47 Is it waste or is it fuel?
24:58 An argument for NOT burying it.
26:24 You can fear it if you like, but you can’t say ‘there is no plan’
27:02 The Dutch Alternative
28:36 Conclusion + Credits
SHOW NOTES
OPG Nuclear Waste (Byproducts) Page
www.opg.com/powering-ontario/...
Dry Casks Weight and Other Info
nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/waste/...
Computing Energy Density of a Fuel Pellet
whatisnuclear.com/energy-dens...
0.1% mass lost of U-235 in Fission (E=mc2 in action)
chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelv...
Some Physics on the Safety of Nuclear Waste
jackdevanney.substack.com/p/t...
How Much Waste Is There?
whatisnuclear.com/how-much-wa...
Kyle Hill: We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago
• We Solved Nuclear Wast...
John Oliver: Nuclear Waste
• Nuclear Waste: Last We...
Visualizing Carbon (explanation of image of CO2 in Manhattan)
www.anthropocenemagazine.org/...
How Much Nuclear Fuel is there on Earth?
whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sus...
Dark Side of Solar Power (Waste Version)
hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side...
Methyl Mercury Risk to Human Health from Hydro Dams
seas.harvard.edu/news/2016/11...
BI - Why Wind Blades Are So Hard to Recycle
• Why Wind Turbine Blade...
Wyoming News Report on Wind Turbines arriving at Landfill
www.wyomingnewsnow.tv/2020/09...
Everything Is Radioactive
www.discovermagazine.com/heal...
Walking with Ligers
• Lions, Tigers and Lige...
Edward Teller’s Big Day at the American Petroleum Institute
thetyee.ca/Culture/2022/09/16...
Info on Plutonium
world-nuclear.org/information...
Shadow of a Giant by Clark Ferguson
arcticartssummit.ca/articles/...
TV Tropes - Can’t spell Failsafe without FAIL
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
COVRA: Netherlands Waste Management Organization
/ coztmkurnou
www.covra.nl/en/
What if you fell in a spent fuel pool?
• What If You Fell Into ...
MY WATER VELOCITY MATH (from 20m10s)
He says they get 10 to the minus 14 or minus 15 metres per second. We’ll start with minus 14 (13 zeroes).
0.00000000000001 m/s
X 60 s/min = 0.0000000000006 m/min
X 60 min/hour = 0.000000000036 m/hour
X 24 hours/day = 0.000000000864 m/day
X 365 days/year = 0.00000031536 m/year
1m divided by 0.00000031536 m/year = 3 170 979.1 years/m
Then to get the result for 10 to the negative 15 m/s, I slide the decimal one place to the right.
31 709 791 years/m
So somewhere around 3 to 30 million years for water to move a metre. In other words, a thousand times slower than completely still.
---
To help sustain and grow Decouple: / decouple
More about Decouple Media: www.decouplemedia.org - Наука та технологія
As a CANDU worker, I thank you for your educational service.
Was literally today listening to Decouple and thinking “I may be now convinced on nuclear, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to get anyone to listen to half a dozen 1hr podcast episodes and I’m sure not about to convey all the correct details in a compelling way verbally. Someone should make a UA-cam channel about it” and here we are.
Very well done.
I worked on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in the early 1980's while I was at Los Alamos National Laboratories. The problem of safely storing high level nuclear waste was solved by then. Yucca Mountain has the perfect combination of geography and geology. We know exactly what to do with the high level waste from the USA. Excellent video! This is an emotional problem, not a technical problem.
Thanks for popping in Patrick. And thanks for your contribution to solving the challenge.
Cratons are perfect, closest one to you is in north east Canada.
I don’t get why we need any of these storage solutions at all.
The PWR and CANDU are great sources of fuel and a precious resource.
Wow. This video just became my standard reference to anyone asking "what about nuclear waste?".You did an amazing job!
I’m not convinced, it’s too cavalier about radioactive waste that last very long time and downplayed the dangers.
Accidents are caused by complacency and each time some nuclear accident happened, they would say that would never happen again because of da, da and da. There will always be hidden dangers that are unthought of.
There are horrible accidents that many people don’t know about. I read of some radiation leaks where Japanese workers were exposed to the nuclear fuels. One by one they died, with the last dying a horrible slow and painful death. That was before Fukushima accidents, and I don’t think it’s the only one apart from the disasters we know well.
@@madsam0320 Feelings. Like a fear of spiders. ‘There are people that died horribly from spider bites”, etc. There is no ‘convincing’ anyone out of that fear.
@@madsam0320 Maybe it just *rightplayed* the dangers.
Do you know a speck of plutonium so small it can sit on a pin head can kill over a thousand people?
That is real fact, that is rightplayed.
@@madsam0320How do you feel about resources that overplay the concerns of spent nuclear fuel, AKA nuclear waste?
I just laughed out loud at the hockey stick!
I don't often click on YT ads, but this one drew me in. I used to be quite fearful of nuclear energy until I learnt more about it, and was extremely curious as to what had to be said regarding nuclear waste. I'm only a few minutes in, but this is EXTREMELY well done and put together. I'm honestly surprised that your channel isn't bigger. Definitely excited to see your other content and also what you put out in future 🙏 anyway, I hope that you have a great weekend!
Thanks OF! Much appreciated! Maybe those ads are worth it after all (we have a very very humble ad budget)
Let me get this straight. Before it's tossed down a glorified mountain hole where water won't get at it for millions of years, it's sitting around - perfectly safe - in concrete storage boxes with people walking about daily? Now, I knew that waste management of nuclear fuel was over engineered to eliminate risk ... but sheesh.
Epic production brother! Really puts the waste issue in perspective! ❤
Absolutely hysterical that you show dangerous ladders 🪜 and then later guy goes up ladder on nuclear dry cask! 😂😂😂
Glad you caught that! As an aside I think those plants are the least likely place you're gonna find someone falling. Very strict rules on how to use everything from ladders to stairs.
Well, they don't call it hazardous nuclear waste for nothing you know. And if you were to try climbing on top of a waste vessel without a ladder, it would be even more hazardous.
Great video, we have not yet built a, Deep level repository in the UK. We're still arguing about where it's going to go. At the moment, all the waste is stored under water & above ground. But it's comforting to know that the waste that does exist is, far less harmful than the gigatonnes of waste from Fossil Fuel power generation...
Great editing!
Thanks!
Jessie's videos just getting better and better! Absolutely superb work! 🙌
Just a single nitpick if I'm allowed to (nothing's perfect even though you got quite close!): at 23:24 you mention Teller is standing in front of used nuclear fuel, but those green vessels almost surely contain enrichment tails, i.e. the depleted uranium (DU) "waste" that isn't irradiated and typically just sits there as UF6. Although people have got nervous lately about its very low radioactivity (plus wanting to reuse the fluorine, which has value), thus conversion of DU stockpiles back to U3O8 is underway in the US.
Naturally, as Teller goes about saying, those DU stockpiles are potential fuel for future breeders, that doesn't need to be mined nor refined.
Staying tuned for the next one! And once again, kudos.
Love how you and Jaro both caught this. Thanks for the heads up!!
Great job Jesse. Beautiful content and delivery. I gotta watch some more films... just need a fuel bundle buddy.
A classic fiction film a month is the minimum viable vitamin intake for the soul.
Fantastic work. Lots of creativity in this.
Thanks so much Gord! Means a lot coming from you!
I got this video from an ad recommending this video on a Kyle Hill video, his latest one
Thank you random ad, thank you for bringing me here for more nuclear content
There should be a Madmax sequal, where the road warrior searches for a nuclear waste repository to repower humanity.
If you don't mind, I now want to steal that and write a short story with something like that as the premise. I've also come to the conclusion that the best way to end the tragic tale is to have the heroes successfully manage to breach a repository and get to the bottom of it... only to find that the spent fuel has all been transmuted to lead. At that point, the main character falls to his knees, hurling expletives in a callback to Planet of the Apes (yeah, the timeliness would be massively exacerbated, but it makes for a good yarn)
21:15 It's a bit paradoxical when a guy wearing safety glasses inside a vehicle on a public road mentions excessive safetyism.
I know right?!? And wearing an engineer's hat when he's not even on a train?!?
@@decouplemedia He should have had a hard hat or a helmet on. And a dust mask. There's still some coofid floating around out there apparently.
Oh man... You had me laughing multiple times there. The match bit 😂.
Masterclass in communicating on spent fuel aka "waste". This will be a huge resource for us advocates trying to talk to journalists and policymakers about this. Really appreciate all the work that went into this. Stay rad ✊
My thoughts entirely, Eric! 👌😃
And I didn't know that the small pillows given to airline passengers were in lieu of parachutes!
Probably one of the smallest channels I'm subbed to but one of my favorites - keep being handsome and providing easy to digest information to educate the next generations, brother
Thanks! I would brag that sometimes small can be powerful (like uranium pellets). But honestly we would rather be big hehe.
@@decouplemedia It's not the size that matters...but big = better simple as :^P
High level waste - irradiated used fuel rods is actually a viable fuel for fast spectrum molten salt reactors. The oxide fuel is chemically processed into a fuel salt. All the actinides are present so there’s no proliferation issue. It then delivers at least 20x as much power as the old PWR was able to take. The result is a waste with a 1/2 life of 30 years vs 30,000 years for the bare fuel rods.
The match bit was perfect 😂😂
Thanks Dylan!
This is such an incredible video. You left no stone unturned in terms of nuclear waste topic. Well done Jesse!
Means sooo much coming from you Princy! Onward!
Amazing Jess! Your videos have always been excellent but this is at a higher level! Thank you for the research and thoughtful ways to share them. It’s fun. Impactful and totally important. Bravo
Thanks Jean-Marc! Means so much coming from a craftmaster like yourself!!
Good job Jesse. You lowered my anxiety level significantly - but I still do have questions about cuddling bundles !
My main criticism for this very well made video is that it accepts the LNT-based error that radiation is always dangerous. It isnt as maybe my video may convince you: No More Radiophobia! ua-cam.com/video/JpcUCo0ebNA/v-deo.html .
Thanks Richard! Yes probably best to have a dosimeter with you to be sure before cuddling a fuel bundle. But the numbers were checked over by a professional health physicist and we went with the more conservative answers.
As a nuclear engineer myself , I’d say this is really accurate. The fuzz about radioactive waste is really over exaggerated.
Thanks Kaizen!
Great job
"protect the fuel from humanity's filthy fingers" 🙂
Hello 🌹🤗
Hello.. Rwzani how are you doing today and how’s the weather condition over there ?
I've fallen off ladders too many times to count.
Frank! Be careful!
I love this video! Genius! Now if I can just get my wife that is terrified of nuclear waste to watch this amazing video and buy me a Decouple T-shirt from the UK shipped to Texas.
We deliver to Texas! decouple.teemill.com/product/the-decouple-tee/
Awesome! Just placed my order to San Antonio!
Your wife is wise, it’s nasty stuff.. read about the horrible death of a man exposed to massive radiation.
ua-cam.com/video/2TxLrfdMKWY/v-deo.html
Great video Jesse.
I could only spot one error in the whole thing: At the 23:27 point, you say that Edward Teller is "standing in front of some used nuclear fuel."
That's not the case.
Those cylinders are typically used to store DU - depleted uranium - from enrichment plants. It's in the form of hexafluoride or "DUF".
If that DUF were converted back to metal (or oxide) it could be used in breeder reactors, as you state correctly elsewhere.
TerraPower's MCFR is intended to do exactly that.
This avoids having to deal with used nuclear fuel - reprocessing it - which is far more complicated and costly.
Also, there is far more DU available in storage, that there is used nuclear fuel.
Interesting. I don't have it in front of me right now but I'm 82% sure in the original film (entitled Endless Energy) Teller says they are half full of U-238. But its quite possible I'm remembering it wrong. Or that that original film got it wrong. Thanks for pointing it out!
@@decouplemedia DU is basically U238.
The enrichment process leaves these "tailings", which are like natural uranium, but with the U235 fraction reduced from 0.71% to about 0.2%.
I just realized that this impacts on your thesis, that used fuel can be re-used.
It can.
But DU is easier & cheaper to deal with, as well as being more plentiful.
Sorry about that.
@@jarofranta153 Actually Jessie's thesis still holds. The valuable bit in spent fuel isn't the fertile, which is plentiful and centuries' worth of it literally sit ready to use as enrichment tailing stockpiles, but the fissile. That tiny 1% of spent fuel mass that is Pu that today is perceived as a terrible stewardship burden, could prove handy (and cheaper than substitutes) for our descendants.
On the one hand, beeders indeed make their own fissile and some while running purely on fertile feeds such as U-238 or Th-232. On the other hand, they still need an initial stock of fissile material to start up, i.e. the fissile works almost like a catalyst whose inventory you have to somehow obtain. For a fast breeder that can be 5-10 tons fissile/GWe; if we imagine our descendants getting it all as enriched uranium (i.e., HALEU) that'd mean mining up to 2,000 tons of U/GWe. If by then we have depleted all easily accesible cheap U ores by burning the U-235 in them (today's reserves are conservatively around 4-7 MtU) and then proceeded to bury the spent fuel making it inaccessible, we'll have left our descendants with no other choice but to get it from dilute ores on land or seawater, or to build the fleet very slowly over decades or centuries by accumulating bred fissile.
None of this is by any means a deal breaker, and it's mostly a remote concern rather than a practical proximate one. Still, we get daily preaches about the need to move to renewable sources -not just clean, as if fossil fuels were at risk of imminent depletion, or if that was the reason we should stop burning them. So why can't we do the same here? In that quasi-philosophical context, I do buy Jessie's argument. Why do we want to make things harder for future generations? If sustainability means anything, it is "the ability to satisfy current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to do so". Aren't we by putting our spent fuel in the subsurface forever, just to alleviate our own public anxieties on radioactivity with the hope of breaking political deadlock, doing something which is unsustainable by definition? Shouldn't we grow up and solve political problems via politics?
Sorry for the long rant!
As a US resident, I learned about the CANDU reactors when I was working for a software company that had Canadian customers in the power industry. When I found out about how the CANDU reactors were designed and operated, I gained a lot of respect for the Canadian nuclear effort. In the US, we could learn a lot from studying that history.
Safety-ism … that’s a good word
Dude this was awesome! Thank you 😊
I believe the largest push back against nuclear is coming from the nat gas industry through many different organizations. They have the most to lose from nuclear and also the most to gain from more and more wind and solar. Affordable large scale backup for wind/solar from batteries is decades away (if ever) and until then nat gas is the only thing that can affordably fill in for the 2/3 of the time when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. So more renewables ensures more nat gas usage, while more nuclear would mean less, a lot less.
NRDC for example has invested in fossil gas.
Thanks for the content! Fantastic work!
A great Video. Thank you for this informations.
Simply the best video on the nuclear waste conundrum i've ever seen, nuclear advocates & nuclear detractors alike need to see this & share, incredibly informative!
Thank you Marcus! We love superlative compliments!
Great video!
Stunningly made video!
Excellent video ......these are the videos that should go viral.
I used to wonder and was worried about nuclear waste etc etc.
But for now my worries are gone
Wow very well done!
Im going to save this video.
Brilliant Jesse, excellent work, thank you 😊
Thanks Lindsay!!
@@decouplemedia Keep up the great work we need more concise informed content like this. Love the movie watching example, so on point for the real world.
Subscribed.
It would be great to see ways that we can help.
Excellent video, thank you
Thanks JF!
I had something else to do until I mistakingly clicked this video and now I'm stuck till the end. You did an amazing job here👏🏾👏🏾.
Thanks Emmanuel! What's better than a mistake the improves the situation?? haha
I just ate a banana. Now I’m thinking about the radiation I’m absorbing from eating it.
Bananas have antimatter shooting out of them!!!
Yes, I know it's a tiny amount, and more importantly an utterly harmless amount, but it's fun to phrase it that way for drama.
@@davidfetter
I don’t know about antimatter. Haven’t heard that before. However the composition of bananas is high in certain naturally occurring isotopes so they’re slightly higher than background radiation.
Normally I’ve only thought of them from the being exposed externally. The point made about eating radioactive waste made me think about eating naturally radioactive bananas. Still not concerned about the health risks. The benefits of eating bananas
At school in the 1980s we were gas lighted by "green peace" about the horrors of nuclear waste. As someone interested in physics at the time - i wondered why if nuclear waste has so much energy still left in it are we throwing it away?
yes it can be recycled, thus significantly reducing the half-life, possibly as low as a few hundred years.
Certified nuclear energy enjoyer
Great video.
Great presentation.
Very informative.
Thanks Emmanuel! Much appreciated.
Fantastic film. Well done.
I loved this programme. Thanks.
Thanks Alida!
Fantastic video! One thing that I can't get out of my head when looking at the dry casks. They look almost exactly like a bucket that you can buy road salt in. Just many times bigger. It looks like it's just storing a LOT of road salt. Also, the only thing I wish you added was the Moltex reactor. But otherwise a fantastic video!
Yes Moltex is a very interesting tech. For this 'Waste 101' video wanted to stick to just what has been proven in the field. Really hoping to see Moltex succeed though. A great example of what could happen if we went back to putting our best minds on nuclear energy (instead of coming up with better ways to get the caramel in the caramilk bar)
@@decouplemedia hey now! Chocolate is serious business! I will not sit here while you besmirch the caramilk bar! 😁 In seriousess though, I'm really curious. I'm not 100% sure but I think the spent fuel from the BRWX-300 could be used in a CANDU. Meaning we might see the same fuel used three times. BWRX-300 > CANDU > Moltex waste burner. That would be impressive.
Slow spectrum reactors burning uranium oxide fuel (eg PWR) can only remove about 4% of the fissile energy. 96% is untouched and that’s exactly why it’s so incredibly radioactive. Moltex and Elysium are going through the regulatory hoops to use waste fuel rods as commercial fuel. Just 4% of the fissile energy has been extracted. 25x as much is fitting there waiting to be used. No new mining, a high operating temperature (highly efficient) and a radioactive waste life 1/1000 of the original downgrade fuel.
I'm going to look into this SMR-Candu-Moltex fuel cycle for sure.
@@decouplemedia wohooo! Exciting stuff!
OMG, this video is so accurate, and so funny. It is sad that so many people are unable to understand the simple truth in this film.
Great video Jesse.
Regarding the remaining habitable time left for planet Earth, a major challenge occurs in about a billion years when the gradually brightening Sun evaporates the oceans. This is generally held to be a Bad Thing, but of course is much less dramatic than the much later engulfing scene.
Hehe. Good catch Jon! When I make these videos I have to be very disciplined about not spending hours researching/confirming facts that are tangential to the central argument of the piece, in particular my snarky humour bits. But as I was watching the dramatizations I said to myself "things are clearly gonna get hairy long before the expanding sun gets anywhere near Earth, I'm gonna look into the exact timeline of consquences" but then slapped my hand and got back to the nuclear waste stuff. hehe.
Excellent informative presentation... you exhibit great bravery sharing your knowledge in these days of scientific ignorance... good luck and please populate the future!
@ 2:30 I don't get it, how comes a Uranium fuel Pellet is not Radioactive from the beginning but only gets radioaktiv during the time spent in the reactor?
Not an expert, but once it goes inside a nuclear reactor it gets exposed to neutrons which triggers nuclear fission. ie, it makes an uranium split into two atoms. these fission products may be very radioactive.
What Ara said is bang on. I would just add that the fuel pellets pre-fission are radioactive, more radioactive than a banana or a table, but not radioactive enough to be dangerous. But as Ara says some of the products created by fission (the splitting of the uranium atom) are very radioactive (and thus shortlived) and you definitely want 10 feet of water or so between you and them to absorb their gamma rays.
I love your content ❤
Thanks Caleb! Much appreciated!
Thanks the Nukleria e.V. Association in Germany, they shared this Video on Linkedin and I was very impressed by this quality, so I subscribing now, hoping for other videos in this quality.
Really happy about the points and comparing the radioactive waste, with other waste. The Arsenic mine is really shocking, due climate change will increase temperature and let to melding the ice, so its only a matter of time, of a real environmental disaster there.
It’s a mistake to suggest climate change is responsible for every harm.
The things it will do are bad enough.
There’s no glacier “ice” cap out there to melt by that mine. The threat to flooding comes from either a fast spring melt of annual snow fall, as was said, or an extreme rain event.
If you're ever in the Netherlands to visit COVRA I'd love to be there with you. On their website they state that you can book a tour for groups larger than 10 people.
Note taken! Looking forward to this next time I'm in Europe.
The Sciencing Re-search process is a matter of applying the observational principles to study and accumulate the dominant harmonic/anharmonic effective probabilistic information In-form-ation substantiation, systematically, and categorically order it as accurately as possible in the perspectives of Eternity-now landscapes. First comes precisely evaluated evidence and then the Actuality of degrees of accuracy.
A very common characteristic of modern reporting will place emphasis on certain aspects in order to bias the perception in a way that, in the natural context of mono-dualistic continuous connection identification of probabilistic cause-effect situations, only a careful critique/analysis can fill out the appropriate spectrum.
This is a great video, it will get better with a little aging.
Thanks for the video!
I hope you'll do one that makes a more direct case for breeders and burners, and maybe yet another on just how much of a pain in the rump it is to get from a hunk of plutonium to even the crudest, least weaponizable nuclear explosive.
Oh, and I'd hoped you'd choose a Slim Pickens clip from Dr. Strangelove. The title was definitely a Checkov's gun for a reference to that movie. Kudos!
Hehe. Yah it was a tough job picking which scene from each of those classic films to highlight. But I'm at peace with my choices.
This is an absolute masterclass on spend nuclear fuel, or as we should call it: THE WORLDS BEST WASTE.
It is basically just a heavy metal, easy to store and handle, has killed 0 people in 60+ years and it can be recycled in the next generation of reactors.
Amazing job!! Extremely educational and fun.
Thanks so much!
Instant subscribe
Instant Like!
Brilliant.
Thanks Ben!
Brilliant video, as it is engaging! I was waiting for the part about recycling SNF, and having grown up in the 60's, being taught to hate Teller, father of the H-bomb, here, I actually love him for his Strangeloveian plugging nuclear power to replace fossil fuels to save the planet (in 1959!). The part about breeder reactors might well have come before all the nevertheless great build-up on how safely the stuff is stored, but the one caveat about breeding new fuel that could be dismissed might simply be that all that bi-product generated bomb-grade Pu could be denatured, or rendered unusable - at least as far as some scientific reports I've come across. No? If so, a total, over the top win-win, and pretty much 'burying' the 'waste problem' for, like, ever!
Good points. I guess the challenge with everything that has to do with proliferation and bomb development is a question of trust and/or monitoring. In other words, that even if the int'l or national protocol was to denature the bomb-grade Pu, an actor with no intention to abide by that could use a breeder reactor to stock Pu more efficiently than they could with a conventional reactor. And in that sense I do think it is important to discuss that potential downside to a world of breeder reactors. Though I do wish I had the time in this piece to go down a bit of a tangent into exactly how far you still are from a functional bomb even if you have a pile of plutonium (that you managed to sneak past the IAEA fairly impressive monitoring regime). But thanks for bringing this up because for me personally (Jesse, not speaking for Decouple as a whole) the most important challenge facing the future expansion of nuclear energy to replace most of the work currently being done by fossil fuels is the threat of nuclear weapons, even if it is a minute one, risk calculation is probability x potential consequences, and in this case the potential consequences is almost incalculably large. So it always merits the most thorough of thinking and discussion.
And as far as Teller goes, I don't think I could ever trust or respect a man who literally had a picture of the first successful h-bomb test sitting over his desk. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EdwardTeller1958_fewer_smudges.jpg#/media/File:EdwardTeller1958_fewer_smudges.jpg
Not to mention the lies and shenanigans he pulled to remove Oppenheimer from his way. But like you I thought it was interesting the parallel between him and Strangelove. The idea that this despicable human was a pioneer to the thinking I'm currently exploring (that nuclear energy may be the greatest solution for humanity to have both material dignity AND avoid ecological disaster) is a great example of why my takeaway with Teller is that its important to have Dr. Strangelove in the room to share his research and analysis, but NEVER let him have any real power.
We might well be grateful that Teller wasn’t working for the Third Reich :-O
Not to allow him too much benefit of the doubt, he may have been so deeply and abstractly into the physics of nuclear energy that his quest was to actualize a god-like Big Bang as a successful experiment…the photo over his desk being his greatest trophy.
I don’t know enough about Teller or his morals, but besting the Red Scare and the Cold War arms race was a central goal of his Dept. of Defense employer.
And there was that bunch of scientists who cooked up the concept of a Neutron Bomb to make Teller’s H. look minuscule by comparison.
And who could forget the Mother of All Weapons, the Doomsday Machine, which, when implanted within the Earth’s core would rend the planet apart? Take that, Soviet scum!
Haha. Yeah the idea of the scientist just calmly developing planet-destroying weapons motivated solely by the desire to solve a physics problem reminds me of Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' thesis in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. In the Teller case it helps explain why good institutions need people with both humanistic values as well as the freedom/channels to blow the whistle when those values are being threatened.
The USA's otherwise high tech ability with advanced nuclear is severely hogtied, due to the insanely overly-protective Nuclear Regulatory Commission's obsession with zero-radiation. Then it's up to other countries to lead the way to a carbon-free future with nuclear power....O, Canada?
Amazingly, well presented and informative video. Always good to question the controllers narrative and find out the truth. 😍
Really glad you enjoyed it!
Absolutely brilliant fantastic word. Although I will have to edit out the F bombs in the S bombs. Those are two of the seven words that you can never say on American radio governed by the FCC.
Sorry! You think in the future we should bleep it?
@@decouplemedia Hell no! Down here in New Zealand (& Australia) those words are part of 'frank and honest' journalistic reporting. In some street conversations, they're used as 'spoken fillers'. 🤣 There's only 2, still verboten words one can't say on Public Broadcast here in NZ; the 'N' word and the 'C' word. If certain nutbar ideologues had their way, they'd ban saying 'Nuclear'... "The other verboten N-word, just sayin'... "- Neil DeGrasse Tyson no less
Really we should build a reprocessing plant deep underground. That way, you can recycle it, dispose of the waste and simplify the decommissioning (just grout the facility and leave it in place, it's 500 meters below ground next to all of the nuclear waste anyways).
How about taking some of that waste heat from spent fuel and use for district heating. ( You can bring a container to my house anytime, ( free energy))
Great video! We need more of this kind of information. Especially in the german speaking countries! Can I help translating?
Sure! If you know how to make an .srt file with the german translation we will gladly upload it!!
@@decouplemedia I am gone get informed about it :-)
@@decouplemedia So, I found out that I could either directly edit subtitles in youtube (that needs your permission) or it would be a practical start to get your .srt file as a start. (All the time marks would be there already and I could easily translate them). I would be glad to help.
Finally
Instead of burying it and wasting the waste, 93% of the energy is still in it, thus putting it into a molten salt reactor the fuel will power humans electricity for many many years longer than it did in a pressurized water reactor which after 25 years only used 6 %.
Outstanding vid. Why are we bonkers mad as a species not to do more with this knowledge and resource?
Great video, more people should see this. People need to be more eductaed about this
Thank you Fabian! Couldn't agree more!
10:40 That is censurable, the Indian Point closure.
I really like to watch your nuclear content videos. 👍🏼
Aren't we wasting precious resources into putting so much overprotection around nuclear spent fuel? Wouldn't part of that money be better spent protecting other toxic waste deposits?
This is where I think the conversation should be happening. Even more than the money are all the great minds that are working on the problem that could be deployed elsewhere.
Share this with someone like the video and ask them to do the same information like this should be trending above all the other garbage on all platforms
#WeDeserveBetterGarbageOnUA-cam
Is the dutch waste facility COVRA really the only one open to the public? Isn't the Zwilag in Switzerland also open?
Great catch! I wasn't aware that Zwilag offered tours. Very cool. (But COVRA are still the champs for including all that art hehe...then again Zwilag has a lot more waste to store)
Turn down for what jumpscare😅
Thanks, awesome educational video. Thanks for the time you put in I already knew a lot about nuclear chemistry, radio- chemistry, whatever you want to call it, chemistry was my life for a while, so I am very famliar with the interplay of exponents, nuclear decay and time...but I had never done extrapolation of the decay series such that there were time periods in could fathom in which spent nuclear fuel would again be "safe" to share space with. Thanks for good, practical examples and some excellent counter-arguments to people who don't or won't give nuclear power a chance.
People do not realize that nuclear power, as a field, as a developing technology was given the worst possible introduction to humanity as is possible and the worst chance at being successful in a peaceful application as a technology ever has or ever will.
As its genesis, nuclear chemistry(which didn't really begin and wasn't understood until early in the last century) as a field in its whole, was hijacked and everything in the field was bent towards doing something big with it right away. The most obvious goals that seemed both certain and lucrative were in the prospect of it as an energy source and in particular, as a fuel for a bomb.
What we know today as nuclear energy would be a very different field, and I believe one that conjures up very different images in a person's mind when they hear the word "nuclear."
Nuclear science is just now getting the attention and funding, in the right specialty fields, that it should have experienced around 100 years ago.
Even with all these very strong, negative characteristics of nuclear energy holding it back, it is so promising as a solution to many of mankind's biggest problems, that it has managed to stay very lively in discussions about the future and energy. As well it should. I love the U.S. military so this isn't an attack on them; if we'd spent as much money developing nuclear technologies in to a viable energy source as we did n to an apocalyptic weapon, we wouldn't be having this discussion. You don't have to have a Ph.d in nuclear science to be able to see that there is still a great deal of miracle level discoveries to be made and answers to our most serious problems to be gleaned from nuclear chemistry.
Very good points Chris. I also envision a potential future where our kids look back at the 20th century and think "you guys were sooo close to major breakthrough 'x' that truly unlocks the most efficient, ecologically responsible and safest way to deploy E=MC2, if only you hadn't distracted yourself with those stupid weapons and the politics they created."
At least I breathe a sigh of relief after watching this.
Right?! So did I after spending a day with the waste.
Nuclear waste, what about it?!
Thank you for this. Now how can we get everyone in the world to see it?
The share button? hehe. It's a good question and obviously from our numbers you can tell that we haven't found the answer yet. Any help is very very appreciated.
@@decouplemedia the major media and political narratives are still unchanged from fear mongering and lies. Maybe if we get green organizations to switch their position they can pressure them into change?
Agreed. Finland provides an interesting example of this.
@@decouplemedia unfortunately this country's political system and protest organizations run on money and we don't have enough to get meaningful messages through
I have one problem with the video: Statistically, elevators are actually the safest mode of transportation.
Well. I gotta say that if in 29 mins that's the only problem you found then we're doin pretty well. I hadn't taken elevators into account as I was only considering horizontal (not sure that's the right word) transportation. But now you've got me wondering if maybe bungee cords are the safest form of transportation.
Mars has lots of water, maybe you would like to also look into this subject at some point.
Good point. I should have specified 'liquid water'.
What about the nuclear waste that was dumped at sea in concrete and metal barrels years ago?
What about it as in why didn't I mention it? There's so very many things I didn't have time to get to in this piece. My only focus was "what is the high-level waste, how do we manage it in 2023, and what we might do with it in the future. Ocean dumping ended in the early 90s and no country that we know of ever dumped the high-level used fuel in the ocean. So touching on that subject was outside the purview of this video both in terms of the materials in question and the timeline. But it definitely is an interesting topic to consider in a future video.
Doktor Merkwürdigliebe!
A great advisor...but don't ever put him in charge!
Huh I just noticed that this guy and the mustache guy are not the same person
Hi Jesse, I'm totally excited about your nuclear waste video and would love to translate it into German and lend you my voice. Please get in touch with me. I wrote you in Twitter!
Ich bin auch schon dran. Wollen wir uns zusammen tun?
@@marthintern ja, gerne!
Just put you two in touch over email! Exciting!!
Who owns the plutonium? And how much is it worth?
I wanna be inside an empty stainless steel nuclear box when the next apocalypse arrives😂😂
It's pretty tight in there. How long til you get bored/sore/curious enough to come out ya think?
Major indexes booked their worst yearly performance since 2008 thanks to drivers like the recession, war, hiked interest rate and inflation which so far doesn't seem to be easing off, so l'm left wondering what 2023 has in store for us investors, l've been sitting on over $745K equity from a home sale and I'm not sure where to go from here, is it a good time to buy or do I wait?
This is still a window-shopping market . But there are a lot of intriguing stocks to watch from a variety of sectors. You don't have to act on every forecast, hence i will suggest you get yourself a financial-advsor that can provide you with entry and exit points on the shares/ETF you focus on
When it comes to investing in stocks, one of the biggest mistakes investors can make is throw in the towel right when we hit a bear market bottom and the indexes find support and start to surge. I've been in touch with a coach for awhile now mostly cause I lack the depth knowledge and mental fortitude to deal with these recurring market conditions, I nettd over $220K during this dip, that made it clear there's more to the market that we avg joes don't know
I've actually been looking into advisors lately, the news I've been seeing in the market hasn't been so encouraging. who's the person
My advisor "Jackson Sten Marsh " is highly qualified and experienced in the financial market. he has extensive knowledge of portfolio diversity and is considered an expert in the field. I recommend researching him credentials further. He has many years of experience and is a valuable resource for anyone looking to navigate the financial market.
he appears to be well-educated and well-read. I ran a Google >>search on his name and came across his website;
thank you for sharing..
How about if there's an EMP, and I mean significant mass EMP strike, that causes the whole grid to go down long term??? That would cause a total instant loss of power to transport fuel for the emergency generators (back up) and no electricity to keep the waste etc cool. The plants would melt down which is far more dangerous than nuclear weapons... Just a thought... Then there are the incidents when nuclear plants leak , etc, melt down to any degree...
Thanks for the scenario, an interesting one. A massive EMP taking out the entire grid would wreak all kinds of havoc on our society. See the convo below for a discussion of the worst case scenario for the waste pools.
As to your other point about meltdowns, which I assume you're talking about the reactors here and not the waste pools. Anyways, a meltdown is definitely not more dangerous than a nuclear weapon. We've had three plant meltdowns in nuclear history. Chernobyl (a reactor without containment, which will never be built again) resulted in max 4000 deaths. Three Mile Island resulted in no deaths and Fukushima resulted in zero or one death from radiation (depending on which investigation you privilege). Without downplaying the legitimate fear that those meltdowns created in those local areas, and the healthy fear of meltdowns that has brought nuclear plants to their current level of safety, it is a little irresponsible to compare them to nuclear weapons. The two of which that were deployed against humanity killed somewhere between 120,000 to 230,000 people. Those were 15kt and 22kt bombs. Today's arsenals include thermonuclear weapons 30 times more powerful.
We encourage debate on this channel, but we expect commenters to be responsible with their facts. Please be more careful in the future.
Remind me of the last few years and the unnecessary fear mongering that went on unnecessary.
In France we recycle a part of our nuclear waste, and you can visit easily nuclear power plant
Good point about the fuel recycling in France. But I'm surprised to hear that its easy to get a tour. My understanding was that since 9/11 its been quite difficult to get a tour. My attempts to film in a French plant all came back with rejections, in one instance they said they only allowed cameras from established TV networks inside (which isn't true because they let @DrNozman in, but anyways, I'm over it...sort of). Comment est-ce qu'on s'inscrit à un tour en France?
@@decouplemedia Sorry for the late respond. In France there is a day "journée du patrimoine" where we can visit almost everything (castle, Elysée, ...) and nuclear plant. Plus, some saturday we can get a tour but I think its something restricted to french citizen
What happens to unsupervised spent fuel pools if we all get too sick to look after them in the next pandemic?
This is a really good question and one of many things I cut from the final video (wanted to keep it under 30 mins).
So firstly its important to note that the system needs to be offline for many days, perhaps weeks, before enough water would boil off/evaporate to expose the used fuel to the air. Once it is exposed, which has never happened, we're talking about a very dangerous situation in the room itself: high gamma radiation, high temperatures and the release of radioactive gases. The danger would be quite localized with little to no impact on life outside the plant.
Worth repeating, that this has never happened before and the systems involved are quite simple to run/fix (water pumps and cooling systems) and the amount of water in the pools provides plenty of time to act.
So, in the case of a horrific pandemic or any catastrophe resulting in no healthy humans around to run/fix the pumps for a week plus that is a situation with much bigger threats to be solved than the spent fuel pools. Where are we getting our food and water from?
@@decouplemedia
There was an excursion and damage of the spent fuel exposed by the water boiling of and boiling down in reactors 4's pool.
The pool nearly collapsed and had to be shored up, it would have fell and broke if they didn't install additional concrete beams, top the pool back up and reinstate the cooling.
If they were sick with flu they would have been bed ridden and not even realised the pool was boiling
If they all died of a new covid worse than 19 then the pool would have had a fire and burnt indefinitely?
The idea of 'weeks' you mention and 'food' problems being worse... What effect does that idea have on what can happen if spent fuel and reactors are left unnatended indefinitely?
I think there are about 450 Nuclear Power Stations dotted around the planet.
My good questions are still to come
Also we need to consider the other species aside from our own.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_units_4,_5_and_6
www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/new-evidence-of-nuclear-fuel-releases-found-at-fukushima/
Mark, if we are going to discuss these things it has to be in good faith. One of the 2 links you sent doesn’t even mention spent fuel pools and the wikipedia article confirms what has been known for more than a decade that there was no damage to the fuel in pool 4. We can't know for sure whether or not the fuel was ever uncovered because of the damage to the systems done by one of the world's strongest ever recorded earthquakes, followed by a record tsunami. Which together killed almost 20k people. The latest longitudinal studies from the UN and Tokyo University show 0 known deaths from radiation releases at Fukushima....and changes have been made at most plants in the world to upgrade safety additionally. If we want to solve our species' wicked energy dilemma we need to look at all our options without prejudice. Fearmongering without evidence about the threat posed by spent fuel pools is counter to the spirit of discussion that we need to foster if we're going to progress democratically (which I hope we can agree is a shared goal).
@@decouplemedia
The wiki article says the spent fuel rods were "exposed" "damaged"
"only part of the fuel rods were covered with water. "
And the other article discusses radioactive material escaped outside the building
Unnatended fuel pools can melt and become a spent fuel fire if they are left unnatended
No damage is required, just simply walk away and they boil themselves dry and progress to excursion, fire, meltdown by themselves
I believe
Just barely a mention of utilizing spent fuel in gen. IV reactors. This is the most important point by far, yet barely glossed over. Even Canada's own Moltex Energy is developing a reactor specifically designed to utilize high-level CANDU waste. Why gloss over the most important aspect of nuclear waste?
For this 'Waste 101' video I wanted to stick to tech that has been proven in the field, and even still struggled mightily to keep the video under 30 minutes. Please do not interpret this as "glossing over" Gen 4 reactors and what they promise to do. I very much hope to see Moltex and others succeed. They are the iceberg tip of what could happen if we went back to putting our best minds on nuclear energy, instead of coming up with better ways to get the caramel in the caramilk bar.
@@decouplemedia people worry about having to store this waste for hundreds of thousands of years. The ultimate solution for this waste will be here in tens of years. This is not fusion we're talking about, this is very well understood physics it will happen. This high-level waste is worth a fortune and New power generation that doesn't require any mining. This seems like a pretty important subject to bring up when talking about.
Would it be possible for me to get a a small cask of spent nuclear fuel to heat my airing cupboard? I won't charge anything!