We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago

Dear viewer, you've been conditioned. You've been tricked by years of television shows, movies, and video games into thinking that nuclear waste looks like this. Yellow barrels of bubbling, glowing green goo just ready to be toxic and transformative and spill into some nearby river and make giant insects and stuff. But like how commercials think that people actually sit in jackets and jeans in their own home, this depiction of nuclear waste couldn't be further from the truth. The reality of the situation is one of entirely plausible and safe management, nearly indestructible storage and solutions that we've known about for literally decades. Today, let's see if we can't set the record straight, shall we? Kevin, clean up all this goo. I don't know what it is. Wear some gloves. Now entering the facility. According to basically any poll you'd like to look at on the subject, most people view nuclear waste and its disposal as a fundamental obstacle for the expansion of nuclear power. Many of you may imagine a disaster like Chernobyl, which is now unfortunately ongoing, when I mention nuclear waste. But this is the image in your head that I want to challenge on today's program. It is my contention that nuclear waste is nowhere near the problem you think it is. And this misconception is leading to both improper management of nuclear waste and it's inhibiting the expansion of nuclear power, which of course you know I'm for. So just so you don't think I'm in the pocket of big uranium here, today I will start from the ground up, point A to point B, give you all the facts, and eventually lead you through my reasoning. If at the end of today's episode you don't agree with me, that's fine. At least I think you have all the facts, which I ran by industry professionals before filming this video. So we begin. What is nuclear waste? Nuclear waste, or radioactive waste more generally, is any waste that emits alpha, beta, or gamma radiation. It can be anything from spent nuclear fuel rods down to the gloves that nuclear engineers wear. And it comes from nuclear medicine, nuclear power production, and the reprocessing of nuclear weapons, as well as rare earth mining. To date, almost half a million tons of nuclear waste has been generated, though a third of that has been recycled. Instead of going to a dump or some large single area, because of public skepticism, nuclear waste is almost always either stored where it is generated, on site, in pools of water, or in so-called dry casks above the ground, which we'll get to. Yeah, I called you big uranium because it sounded cool. Make the check out to Kyle Hill, H-I-L. Sorry, I was just subscribing to some magazines. Now, with thousands of tons of nuclear waste accumulating at sites all around the world, you may expect me now to start listing off all the known environmental and health effects from nuclear waste. And that's what makes the public so skeptical, right? Well, I can't. Properly managed nuclear waste has no currently known widespread environmental or public health effects. This isn't barrels and barrels of glowing green goo just waiting to poison your river. No, this is reconstituted nuclear material in ceramic and glass and encased in many kilograms of concrete and steel forever. Sounds like the world is more affected by the waste generated on TikTok. That's right, Aria. Does anyone know how to not dance like they're at a theater kid's boring wedding? Sheesh! What the world seems to have forgotten about, or is just straight up ignoring, is that the non-nuclear waste we are producing right now, every second, is so, so much worse. It's literally killing us right now. Most of the world uses fossil fuels, right? Well, let's do the same comparisons that we just did on this program. How much fossil fuel waste is produced? Well, every year in the U.S. alone, coal plants put more ash into the sky by weight than 300 times all of the nuclear waste ever produced in every single way ever. That happens every year. Do the math, and an average coal plant in the U.S. will put more ash into the air and the atmosphere every hour than a single nuclear plant will in its entire lifetime. Where does all this fossil fuel waste go? Well, look around. The trees, the topsoil, the atmosphere, your lungs. How does it affect people? One in five deaths can be attributed to the burning of inefficient fuels like gasoline and coal. And finally, have there been any large-scale health and environmental effects from proper management of fossil fuel waste? Well, yeah. This hurts to look at because it's hurting the world, and yet we still maintain this tremendous blind spot for things like this. You remember this happening, right? It's true that radioactivity can be dangerous in a different kind of way, but even here, if you look into the numbers, just by nature of how coal is processed, it contains some amount of radioactive material. It comes from the ground just like everything else, and the average coal plant, through its ash, will put more radiation into the atmosphere than a hundred times what a nuclear plant of the same size would. Look, I'm no expert here. I'm no scientist, but I think about radiation a lot. I do my research. I've been to Chernobyl myself, and I can tell you that I'd rather spend a week in Chernobyl, maybe not right now, than, say, a week in Beijing, when the air quality is literally so bad, it's worse than what the first responders at Ground Zero on 9-11 were breathing. Remember, this isn't worst case versus worst case. This is not Chernobyl versus Exxon. This is complicated reality versus complicated reality, and right now, the reality is that fossil fuel is the invisible scourge that people imagine nuclear waste to be. But, Administrator, if nuclear waste isn't as bad as fossil fuel pollution, and the problem is already solved, what is the solution? Ah, yes, the whole point of this episode. And, uh, Aria, get Big Uranium back on the phone. I could use a new Lamborghini. Magazine subscription. Nothing I've said so far actually demonstrates that nuclear waste isn't dangerous, just that it's less harmful than other forms of waste. So let's talk about how nuclear waste is actually managed. Out of a nuclear power plant like the one behind me, there are three kinds of waste that can be produced. Low-level waste, which can be anything from papers to gloves that are lightly irradiated. Intermediate-level waste that does require some shielding but decays well enough over time. And high-level waste. This is the stuff that people worry about. The stuff that needs to be cooled down in cooling ponds for a couple of years before being stored away. Now, even though this is the stuff people really worry about, it's only a tiny, tiny fraction of all the nuclear waste produced. In fact, all of the high-level waste ever created by every nuclear power plant in the world could be buried in just a football field-sized space. Yeah, nuclear power is just that efficient. Now, as we said, high-level waste is stored mostly above ground in so-called dry casks, giant concrete cylinders that can weigh as much as the world's heaviest door. And inside of them is not green goo like you imagine. No, it's glass and ceramic. Nuclear material melted down, combined with glass and ceramic and inert material such that the nuclear stuff stays cool and stays below critical. Despite a blue whale's worth of concrete, despite the known physics of shielding, the public still isn't comfortable with these casks. The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station found this out when they started transferring high-level waste to above-ground casks near a beach, and the people there are still protesting that, imagining that this will be a problem for millennia. However, what they may not realize is that the vast majority, over 95% of all nuclear waste, has a short enough half-life that it can decay on-site to the point of harmlessness in the lifetime of a power plant. Some longer-lived materials will have to be stored away forever, of course, but most of it will decay in the lifetime of a plant to inert rock and glass. At that point, standing next to one of these gargantuan nuclear coffins will literally be less harmful than taking a cross-country flight. Contrast this with fossil fuels again. Coal plants, for example, are the single largest source of mercury pollution on Earth, and neurotoxic metals like this will never, ever lose their toxicity. Ever. They will always be a problem, and today they're not even contained. Administrator, your request for the new Lamborghini Aventador has been denied by Big Uranium. Oh, come on! How many sensible facts do I have to shill for a sick Lambie? When properly stored and managed, nuclear waste is just so much easier to deal with than anything that comes out of fossil fuel use and production. But what about in between nuclear waste production and storage? Couldn't some accident happen when moving nuclear waste around? That's a good question, Aria. I want to show you something. These are nuclear waste transport casks. These are what we use to put nuclear waste in and move it from site A to site B or what have you. Now, for all intents and purposes, these are indestructible. Like, Hulk-level, Infinity Gauntlet-level indestructible. Watch this for a second. Yeah, you can throw a runaway train at one of these things and nothing happens. In the millions and millions of miles these things have traveled across the globe for decades, there have been zero recorded accidents where one cracks open and stuff leaks out. There's nothing to leak. Remember, this is not green glowing goo. This is concrete and steel and glass and ceramic. And because of that, because these things are so indestructible, it's very unlikely any of this is ever going to get weaponized like people are worried about. That's just not how these materials are going to work. What people should be worried about, something like a rogue piece of medical equipment somewhere, as unfortunately the entire city of Goiânia, Brazil, found out a few decades ago. When properly stored and managed, nuclear waste might in fact be the safest waste there is. And all of this is even without the ultimate solution for all of this stuff that nuclear scientists and engineers have known about for decades. So with that, it's time to go underground. Oh, my thighs. The international scientific consensus is that the best option for long-term storage of high-level nuclear waste is deep geological disposal. It sounds simple, and that's because it is. You dig a big hole that goes really far underground. You put the already safe, dry casks in there. You dig the hole so deep that it's below anything that's a water table, geologically active, or a biosphere. It's as isolated as you can get from humanity without literally throwing these things into space, which you can't do. And we know that this deep disposal would work because billions of years ago, nature already tried it. About two billion years ago, in what is now Gabon, Africa, a rich natural uranium deposit, moderated by intruding groundwater, kicked off a series of modestly powerful nuclear reactions, a natural nuclear reactor right in the ground. These reactions generated energy and heat for hundreds of thousands of years. And I'm telling you this little geological factoid, because in all of that time, with all of the movement of the underlying geology, with all of the erosion, with zero protection, zero storage, the waste from this natural reactor, which was in contact with groundwater, moved less than 30 feet away from the site. Even without decades of study, backing it up, even without a metric buttload of specialized concrete shielding, this natural experiment worked. And it's good evidence that deep disposal is relatively safe. If this is such a good solution, why aren't we doing it? Well, why don't we ask the experts? I thought you were an expert. No, no, I'm just an expert at this. To make sure I got the facts in this program right, I spoke with the scientists and engineers over at Deep Isolation, the world's first private company to make advancements in a very promising twist on deep geological disposal. Now, instead of wanting to use giant mines underground that are 18 feet wide and need people and heavy machinery and you have to move casks around with humans, instead of that, they want to use borehole technology that the oil and gas industry already has. Instead of those giant mines, you just drill 18-inch diameter holes, 1,000 feet or more into the ground. You drill it at an angle or horizontal or vertical, but you drill it all the way below aquifers, below anything that's geologically active, below more rock than is in a generic disaster film. Into these holes, you put nuclear casks, you stack them or you line them up, you fill the entire thing with concrete, you seal it, you forget about it. The great thing about this idea is that you can do this all on site at a nuclear power plant. Deep Isolation estimates that it would take just 20 of these size holes, you can find the space somewhere for that, to contain an entire nuclear power plant's lifetime's worth of nuclear waste, which means no single large repository somewhere, no single national site where taxpayers would have to pay for it and accept it. Not accepting it is exactly why a project like the Yucca Mountain Repository died. According to Deep Isolation, geologic disposal is robust enough to survive earthquakes, ruptured canisters, and broken seals. This is simply a benefit of just being so deep underground. Funding exists right now to try something like this, and Deep Isolation has done its own polling to suggest that most of you would be much more comfortable knowing that a million-year solution like this was up and running. Look, I'm partially making this video because yes, I am pro-nuclear power, but I'm mainly making it because this is a perceived, imagined problem that has an easy solution that's staring us right in the face. We have the funding, we have proven technologies, we have scientific consensus. The thing that's holding us back from storing all the nuclear waste in the world right now is you, public acceptance. Whether or not we store waste in a more safe and manageable way, whether or not we do that and then expand nuclear power and then use nuclear power to help fight climate change, that is all up to you. I believe I've given you an accurate portrayal of this landscape. Whether or not it changes your mind, I did all I could as your resident science boy. Until next time, I gotta go fuel up my Lamborghini. Honda Civic, you heard that. Now exiting the facility. Yeah, I know it's a $250,000 car. Do you know how hoarse my voice is from facts spewing? Oh. Thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video. Today, I want to recognize everyone who likes the video. It's an experiment, and subscribes to the channel. If you want to continue on this conversation, if you want to drape on a silky white lab coat, which we're actually making, if you want to join the discord, see videos early, go to patreon.com slash Kyle Hill and join the facility today. And as you can see, there's so many of you. I don't know how I'm going to spend this time sounding in my sultry, sick voice, but I bet a lot of you are wondering about space disposal. It's just a matter of fact that it's way too dangerous and it's going to cost too much money. Launching a rocket is hard. It might blow up. If it blows up with nuclear material in it, that's even worse. You don't want to do that. Thanks again to Deep Isolation. Thanks for watching. No, I'm fine. Send me a car.