Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - How dangerous is nuclear waste?

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

Daniel talks to experts about the waste produced by nuclear reactors, the dangers, risks and options.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone.

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Now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When I was young, kids from neighboring towns would sometimes ask me if I glowed in the dark. It was probably because I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, home of the atomic bomb and secret plutonium facilities. Those kids were kind of joking, but also kind of not. They didn't really understand what nuclear meant. What they knew came from movies and the Simpsons, where nuclear waste was a glowing green goo that gave fish a third eyeball. Well, I'm a big fan of the Simpsons, but I'm here to tell you that I don't glow in the dark and I only have two eyeballs. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine,

and I sincerely hope that my research never kills anyone. Both of my parents worked at Los Alamos National Labs, and I never knew the details of their projects, but I knew that they were involved in the weapons programs, so I never visited their offices or even saw the front door of their building, because it was all in the part of the lab that required a queue clearance to enter. Around town, that was called Working Behind the Fence. They had their reasons for deciding to contribute to our nuclear arsenal, which are pointed its cities and threaten civilian populations with horrible death, but I decided to work on problems that were more abstract, less likely to put new tools of mass destruction into the hands of

politicians. It means that questions that I answer in my research are further removed from humanity. They're less likely to kill anyone, but also less likely to improve your quality of life in the short term by developing new technologies or more powerful toasters. Of course, I think there's inherent value in basic research, you know, knowledge for knowledge's sake. We do fundamental research for the same reason that we build parks. We do it because it's nice, not because we think it's going to lead to a faster graphics processor in quarter two of 2023. But we also know that fundamental research is the best way to stumble on transformational

technologies, just not on the schedule of quarterly profit reports. So welcome to the podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, in which we dive deep into those fundamental questions about the nature of the universe. What's it made of on the smallest scale? How did it come to be this way? How big is the universe? How small is the smallest thing? We seek to understand the basic nature of the universe so that we can ask even deeper, more philosophical questions like, why this way and not some other way. My friend and co-host Jorge Chem is on a break, so I'm going to do a deep dive into an area of physics that is close to my heart and my background. Not because it answers deep questions about the universe, but because it has

so much potential to improve or damage the lives of humanity. It's a wonderful example of the power and danger of putting scientific knowledge to work for people. I'm talking about nuclear power and the dangers of nuclear waste. While fission reactors have proven that they can produce a steady supply of electricity using a very efficient fuel and requiring a tiny land footprint, The questions that hang over them are safety and waste. The 2018 UN report about climate change lays out pathways to limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. And all of their pathways include nuclear power expansion by 150% or more. We have recently done a couple of episodes on the safety of nuclear reactors.

This episode 366 about molten salt reactors, whether alternative designs for fission plants that can produce energy more safely. Then in March of 2022, we had episode 376 about, is nuclear power worth the risks? Where I talked to Kelly about whether we need nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions and whether it can be done safely. So that covers the safety of the nuclear reactor itself. Today we're going to talk about the question of the waste produced in the nuclear cycle. There's a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding out there. So I've invited an expert to help us break it down and think it through. So on today's episode, we'll be tackling the question.

How dangerous is nuclear waste? We sit at a critical moment in our history when climate change is accelerating and we need to make important decisions right now about how to reduce our carbon emissions. But we also need to take care not to spoil our environment. What is the best way forward? Answering that question requires a sober look at the strengths and weaknesses of all the options on the table. I'll remind listeners that in our previous. episode, we explained what makes nuclear power an attractive option. Because while wind and solar are wonderful, they can be transient. Sometimes it's cloudy or the wind doesn't blow. In some places in the

depths of winter, you need solar power when it's least productive. So it's economical to build a grid that uses solar and wind for maybe 80% of our energy. But we need something else, something more robust and steady for the other piece, something to help fill in the gap when the wind doesn't blow and the sun isn't shining. Now, fossil fuels are attractive because they're easy to fire up quickly in response to shortages, but they obviously have huge cost in pollution and carbon emissions. So how well does nuclear power do? It's very steady because it can provide power all day and all night regardless of the weather, but it's tricky to ramp it up or down quickly. And while it makes no smoke or carbon emissions, it produces a very different kind of potentially dangerous pollution in its

radioactive byproducts. Our first guest is Madison Hilly, Executive Director of the Green New Deal. Maddie, welcome to the program. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you so much. It's great to be here, Daniel. So first, help us understand a little bit about your background and your passion for this issue. obviously climate change and decarbonization of our energy is a vital project, but most of

us contribute in minor ways. We reduce our use of fossil fuels or energy consumption or we vote, but you've made it the core of your life's work and career. When did you decide to devote your life to this topic and what made you decide to do that? Yeah, so I went into nuclear advocacy straight out of college in 2017 after I was presented with the environmental case for nuclear. I was really concerned about poverty and developing countries, as well as climate change, issues that I thought were at odds with one another. So when I found out that we can lift people out of poverty with cheap, abundant energy while providing unparalleled environmental protection, I was all in. So from 2017 to 2020, I traveled all over Europe and Asia talking to journalists, policy makers,

and members of the public about the need for nuclear power. And meanwhile, back at home in the U.S., we were shutting down perfectly good reactors and were falling behind the rest of the world on new builds. And I didn't really see anyone articulating a practical vision for transitioning the U.S. nuclear industry from the verge of collapse, frankly, to one capable of delivering the economic, environmental, and security benefits of nuclear power. So in 2020, I decided to turn my focus to the U.S. and launch the campaign for a green nuclear deal. So going into this conversation, I just want to make it clear. I am not a nuclear waste expert.

I don't come from engineering. I came out of college with degrees in environmental sciences and political science because I wanted to study and protect the environment. So everything that I've learned about nuclear was. to figure out the truth, how we can be good stewards of the environment without compromising on human development and prosperity. And I decided to devote my life to being a nuclear advocate because what I learned when I studied was so powerful. Great. Thank you. And there are a lot of interesting issues here, scientific ones, political ones. I thought we'd start with the science and organize our conversation by following the sort of whole cycle of nuclear power.

from mining the fuel and dealing with the spent fuel rods and talking about the waste and the risks at each step. So let's start off with just like what is the fuel that we need for nuclear power for those who haven't immersed their lives in fission and engineering. What is the fuel that we need? Where do we find the fuel for nuclear power? Sure. So the fuel that we need for nuclear is uranium. And most of that can be an isotope U-238. and some of that needs to be more fissionable or readily fissionable isotope U235. So natural uranium that comes out of the ground is in general about 0.7% U235 and 99.3% U238. So we are able to extract uranium and then enrich it to be slightly spicier. That's not a scientific way to describe it, but with a higher percentage of U-235 to create a reaction to reach criticality within a reactor.

And so rather than break up each step of the fuel cycle, I think it's important to start with the context. So whether it's lignite to fuel coal plants, lithium for batteries, or copper for solar panels, all energy technologies and systems, are going to require some amount of extraction. So the question isn't that we're talking about, whether we need to mine or not, but how much mining and extraction is actually required for our system? And from an environmentalist perspective, the key is to minimize the mining that has to be done.

The great thing about nuclear from this perspective throughout the whole fuel cycle, from mining to milling and riching and eventually going into the reactor, is that nuclear is extremely energy dense. The technical definition of energy density is just the amount of energy stored in a given system or substance per unit volume.

But that translates to smallness, compactness, minimal impact. And another great thing about nuclear is that it's baseload. They don't require battery backup. So anytime you need to dip into batteries or storage, you're suddenly talking about much more mining. So minimizing the amount of storage our energy system will need

is the fastest way to reduce lithium mining needs, for example. So wrapping this up, nuclear requires the least amount of mining and extraction across energy technologies. In fact, most of uranium mining globally is done without digging pits or tunnels at all. It's about tiny little wells that have things like straws. suck up the uranium. So you're making uranium sound quite tasty. I mean, it's something you can drink through a straw and even maybe has some spice to it. No, joking aside, I understand the

point that all technologies require extraction of some resources from the earth. And it's certainly true that uranium is very dense source of fuel. But tell us more about how we get it out of the earth. I know that some uranium is mined via open pit mining. There's also this other technique, leech mining. Is this what you were referring to with the straws? Right. Exactly. So you're basically drilling little wells and using liquids to extract uranium without having to dig open pits. And that's, again, the beautiful thing about nuclear is that the ways that in which we extract uranium are incredibly small and minimizing an environmental impact. One of the silver linings to the stigma around nuclear is that the entire

process of extracting uranium and milling it is incredibly regulated, reported with very tight controls and reporting needs compared to fossil fuels or other metallurgical mining, despite being very similar, being exactly the same. So the waste from mining uranium is exactly the same, mostly the same, as any sort of metals that you're mining from the ground. It's just there's a lot less of it, way, way less, and it's more regulated and it's handling because it's part of the nuclear fuel cycle. And I've heard it said that uranium is also very plentiful in the oceans, that most of the uranium on Earth is actually dissolved into the oceans.

Why can't we just filter it out of the water? Why do we need to dig into the ground at all? So it's, you know, as all things, a issue with costs. So uranium that we can mine is very cost effective, whereas when you're getting into the in situ or pulling out of water, it's not as cheap. So in a future where I think a lot of our energy needs will be met by mining, I do suspect we will be doing more of that. So based on the uranium that we consider economically available and the technology that we're using right now, we are able to meet all of our nuclear needs, but we wouldn't have many years in the bank if we ran completely on nuclear power and everyone had a high standard of living.

However, the current reactors that we use barely burn any of the fuel at all. I think just about 1% of all energy available in the fuel rod. So we have these other reactors, fast reactors that can even breed new fuel, which means they can produce about 140 times as much energy from the same amount of uranium that non-breeder reactors can. So that dramatically expands the number of years we can use to power society or we have to power society. We also have thorium, which can only be fully consumed in breeder reactors, which is why we don't

really use it now. There is a roughly equivalent amount of known thorium reserves as uranium. So again, you're doubling that time frame. Now we're talking about, you know, a thousand years. but what if we want to go longer? This is where your question comes into play. So the Earth's crust has an average of less than three parts per million of uranium and about six parts per million of thorium.

So this is a crazy fact. That would mean that a random scoop of dirt has more energy in it than an equivalent scoop of coal. The ocean also has about two to three parts per million of uranium. So like you said, we can extract. that to get to now hundreds of thousands of years of high energy society. And because the ocean will continue to pull uranium and thorium from the soil to maintain that equilibrium, we'll be able to continue that extraction process. So we have at our disposal about four billion years worth of

fissionable resources. It's just what is easily and economically accessible now, given that we don't have this fully nuclear, fully decarbonized system that we imagine we might have in the future. I hope that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. We'll be talking in a few minutes about reprocessing, spent nuclear fuel and thorium cycle and all that kind of stuff. But the picture I'm getting is that we have economically cheap waste access uranium, but we also have vast stores of uranium we can access, which would be slightly more expensive. But in the mining process, you take it out of the ground, and then you also need to sort of refine it a little bit, at this step called milling where they grind the ore material to these uniform particle sizes

and treat them in some process to produce this powder they call yellow cake. So we have this mining and this milling. What are the byproducts there? I mean, you don't just get pure uranium out. You must produce also other stuff. Is that stuff toxic? Is it like radioactive? Is that something we need to worry about?

So like I said, from the mining perspective, it's no different than the tailings from most mining. so that's not anything special that we need to worry about. For the milling process, you do have some, again, spicy, radioactive material left over for a byproduct. But the best thing about it is that it's bagged and tagged. There's almost no radioactivity because that would be a waste of the product you actually want, the radioactive stuff, as a byproduct of. the milling process or one of the byproducts of the milling process can sit around until we do have these breeder reactors and again can be eaten up and used as fuel. So I wouldn't even

technically classify that as waste because one day hopefully it will not be waste. Right. Got it. And so that's not just like dumped in piles on the ground. You're saying it's being carefully tracked somewhere. Right. Again, because of the stigma that the nuclear industry has, it is absolutely necessary that this whole process be under far greater regulation and control. It's not necessary. It's necessary in that the industry wants to defend itself against anti-nuclearism, saying that this isn't safe, this is dirty, this isn't reported. So it's created this hyper-safety regulation culture that's allowed it to be what it is today. Mills are often owned and run by international partners that have all the pressure from their governments to stay as clean as possible.

So it's got the cleanest standards in mining, the cleanest standards in milling. So that covers mining and milling and now we have the basic ingredients. Next we'll talk about enrichment, but first, before we get into the spiciest side of nuclear power, we need to take a short break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush.

Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion, actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay.

Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Lerner, law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious oh wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota it's back

to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot he doesn't think it's a problem but i don't trust her Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating.

He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart radio app, podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone to land

this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do my eyes close. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devon. And on our new show, No Such Thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real.

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Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com Okay, we're back and we're talking with Maddie Hilly about the dangers of nuclear waste. What is produced? How dangerous is it? What are the options for storing it? So far we've talked about how to get the stuff out of the ground with mining and milling.

And next we need to talk about enrichment. You said earlier that most of the uranium that we take out of the ground is 238, whereas there's also U-235. So for our listeners, those numbers refer to the isotopes of the uranium, essentially how many protons and neutrons are in the nucleus. Sounds very similar, but just three numbers different means very different abilities to fission these materials into something useful. U-235 is very fissile, while U-238 needs faster neutrons.

So U-235, the rare one, is the kind of material that we need, the actual fuel, in these reactors. So there's this step where we enrich these things where we take something which is mostly U-238 and we boost up the U-235 fraction of it. How does that typically happen, Maddie? Is it mostly through centrifuges? So quick note, some reactors don't currently use enriched fuel. So for example, the can-dos in Canada can use natural uranium. So that same ratio of U-235 to U-238. But most reactors around the world, the lightwaters that we're talking about do. And yes, those are enriched with centrifuges. But we might be getting a new technology soon, laser enrichment.

I'm definitely not an expert on enrichment. So I can't describe the laser enrichment process. But that might make enriching, I think, easier and cheaper is the hope. And so this leads to some samples of uranium with more U-235 and some samples with less. I mean, what you're doing here is you're separating it, right? You're concentrating the U-235. So there must be some waste there, right? Some, I think they call this depleted uranium.

Yes. So with this depleted uranium, if the market price for uranium goes up, we use more of that depleted uranium. So again, this is not waste in the sense that these are byproducts we can never use again. it's that we do not use them now because it's economically cheaper to just not use it. So you can call it extra, not waste. All right, that sounds like a very nice word for it. And in terms of volume, there must be sort of a lot of this, right? We need to enrich the uranium from less than 1% to up to a few percent.

We must produce a lot of this depleted uranium. Where is that stuff? Is it sitting in warehouses somewhere? Is it being used for something else? So first of all, you know, when we're talking about a lot, that's relative to nuclear. I mean, in general, the amounts that we're talking about with uranium and nuclear are just very small because it's very dense. So a lot is actually a very small amount of depleted uranium sitting near the conversion facilities. You know, just in general, from the mine to the reactor, the material flow is very, very small.

which, you know, so when Greenpeace talks about all of the nuclear waste, there's just so little of it that we really have to put it into context. It's important to be reminded that there are very small material volumes. So more than you could put in your pickup truck, for example, but much less than is produced by coal or mining for battery parts, for example, is your point? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So all of the waste from commercial nuclear energy, the entire history in the U.S. could fit on a football field stacked about 50 feet high. So each nation only needs a few facilities the size of normal warehouses to store any of this waste or extra that comes from the process of creating nuclear fuel. So then let's talk about the spicy part. Let's talk about actual power generation. So we have our nuclear plan. We got the U-235 in there. We have it critically dense so that the neutrons that come off of the fission are slowed down by the water and trigger reactions in other U-235 atoms. And for those listeners who want to know more details about the process, check out our previous episodes about nuclear power.

We talked about the technology in light water reactors and salt reactors and all that kind of stuff. But the key thing to understand here is that, as you said earlier, most of the fuel that's in the rod is still U-238. and it's there during the process and it gets split apart and it's transformed by the process, but you still end up with a fuel rod that has a lot of uranium in it. So what exactly is produced

when you're done running the fuel? You've gotten your energy out. What is it that comes out? What does the fuel rod consist of after the process of extracting the energy? Right. So you pull out the fuel rod assembly from the reactor and that's what is

what we call the waste. And that waste is made up of three things. one, the unused uranium, which is most of it, two, the fission products, which are atomic fragments, call them lighter than uranium, and transuranics, which are radioactive elements that are heavier than uranium. And all three of these things are stored in the pellets, which are stored inside the fuel rods. So that's what's coming out of the reactor. So heavier than uranium, that's a little surprising. I'm thinking fission, I'm thinking uranium is breaking down. I'm expecting to get stuff that's smaller than uranium.

But I know, for example, that plutonium is produced? Is that because it's absorbing neutrons? It's not breaking up. It's just like grabbing some of these neutrons and it's going up the periodic table. Exactly. So those transuranics are the result of uranium absorbing neutrons, but not fissioning. So you can think of transuranics as future reactor fuel from, utrons going into uranium and making them chonking it up, so to speak.

On the other hand, you have these fission products, which are small and the result of, as you were describing the fissioning, they're the fragments left over at the end of that process. Great. So we have these three elements. You're saying we have the leftover uranium. We have the transuranics like plutonium. And then we have the byproducts. And so here we have things that are like Neptuneium 237 with a two million year half life and uranium 234 with a hundreds of year lifetime. I think this is the kind of stuff people think about when they hear nuclear waste. They hear about things that are radioactive and that will last for millions of years.

So tell us about the dangers of these. Like how dangerous are these things? Why are we worried about them? So the general rule of thumb for radiation is that a short half life means higher radioactivity, so much spicier, but for a shorter period. of time. Long half-life means lower radioactivity. It's less spicy, but over a much longer time. So very short half-life products are of little concern when we talk about the waste because by definition, they've already lost most of their radioactivity by the time the fuel rods have

cooled off. So all of waste management is really dealing with these longer-lasting products. And so transuranics do have a long, effective half-life, but that also means they don't produce nearly the heat or penetrating radiation of those short half-like products or fission products. And so they might last for a long time, but they're not nearly as hazardous as some of the other materials that we're concerned about. And because these transuranics can be consumed in fast reactors, that would mean their remaining waste is very short-lived compared to the traditional spent fuel that we currently have. All right. So you're telling us that the stuff that doesn't last very long, like the cesium-137 and the strontium-90, these have half-lives of like decades. These things

are very toxic because they don't last very long. They're like giving up the ghost all in one go spraying out all of their toxicity in the moment, whereas the other stuff, the stuff that people think about lasting a very long time isn't as dangerous because it lasts a long time because it sort of spreads out the poison for millions of years rather than decades. Exactly. And most of those transuranics actually have radioactivity less than the equivalent of their uranium or equivalent to one ton of fuel. So it would be like grabbing dirt, essentially. So let's talk about what we can do with this stuff. Obviously, the very short-lived products, the very toxic ones, this just needs to be stored and you just need to be shielded from it

until the radioactivity dies away. Those have half lives of like decades. But there's other stuff, plutonium 238, plutonium 239, is very long-lived. You're saying that we can reuse this. It's a little surprising and counterintuitive to think like the waste that comes out is also fueled because why wasn't it just fuel the first time around? What do you need to do to it to make it like usable again? Why wasn't it just useful in the first go-around? Right. So this in part gets into the difference of reactors that we have and reactors that we will use in the future. So in thermal nuclear power plants, we're talking about slow neutrons. These are neutrons that basically move at the same speed of the materials in the reactor.

So slow, relatively speaking, as opposed to fast reactors where fast neutrons smash up everything in there, but are less efficient doing so. So you need a lot of neutrons and you need to move fast because some leak. Right. So my understanding is that the slow reactors, here you have U-235 and they produce neutrons that are a little bit faster than they actually need to take in order to do more efficient. Right? So U-235 produces neutrons. And if those hit other atoms, they would cause fission, but it actually works better if they're a little bit slower. This whole nuclear model where you have protons and neutrons layered together in these shells, the speed at which the neutron hits it really affects whether it's going to split in half or get absorbed. So in the original process, the thermal water reactors, you've got to slow down those neutrons to be like the optimal speed for U-235. Because you're saying these other fuels, they actually like faster neutrons. So now you need like a different kind of. of reactor, one where you have the fast neutrons buzzing about to create fission in these other

products. So the two steps require different speeds of neutrons, which is why it doesn't just happen all at once. Right. So if you're working with slow neutrons, which we do in our current thermal reactors, you form, but do not fission the transuranics. So what you would need to do is take them out and switch them to a fast reactor. But you can also just start with a fast reactor. In fact, the first ever light bulb to get powered by a generator from a nuclear reactor was a fast reactor. And so historically, did we start out with just the sort of slow neutron reactors and not worry about this stuff because it was cheaper to be inefficient about it to sort of use up some of the U-235 and leave the rest of the stuff as waste? And now we're developing these faster reactors?

Or what's the history of it there, if you know? So we did try a lot of what are now being touted as advanced nuclear designs back in the 50s and 60s, with the commercial nuclear energy program. Part of the reason we chose light water is that for these fast reactors, you need spicier fuel. You need that higher enrichment, the higher ratio of U-235 to U-2-38,

to start up that fast reactor. And so the thought was that's, you know, more difficult, has higher proliferation risks, was the main motivation to avoid that and stick with the lower enrichment. And light water really helps to slow down neutrons a lot while carrying away lots of heat, which is how you get energy from a reactor.

So I think there's this narrative that, oh, we just chose this very inefficient technology because we adopted it from the Navy and we got locked in, whereas there are these other better alternative designs where there were actually a lot of, physical and engineering and like sound reasons why the light water reactor was a really great reactor to commercialize and export to the rest of the world.

All right. So now we have this technology. We produce waste and part of that we can reprocess into fuel for other reactors, extract even more energy out of it. As you were saying, this gives us a huge extension on our ability to like power our society using uranium. But still we're going to have some waste. In the end, we can't burn everything up into harmless byproducts, even if you do these fast reactors, you get something. So tell us about what it is that actually comes out. I mean, I think in people's minds, you have these Homer Simpson barrels of glowing green goo. What does the nuclear waste actually look like? Right. So for most of the world, it looks like this. They are long, skinny, metallic rods that are all put together

in a bundle called a fuel assembly. And once they're done cooking in their reactor, you take them out, they're put into what's called spent fuel pool to cool off. And then afterwards, you know, maybe like five years or so, they're taken out and put into these virtually indestructible, large steel and concrete containers called casks. Can I stop you there and ask you about that? You said that they cool off for five years in a pool. Are we talking about heat in terms of like radioactive spiciness or heat in terms of temperature what takes five years to cool down both so like i said there are the short-lived spicier products that we want to lose their radioactivity but there's also the thermal energy from radiation so the answer is both

so these things are literally hot and they take five years to get colder is that because of the radioactive processes are still happening like the cesium and the strontium that's decaying. It's still heating up the rod as it's cooling. Yeah. The spiciest stuff is decaying rapidly and that's putting off thermal energy. And can we capture any of that energy? It seems like you have these glowing rods that are dumping heat. Can we just use water and capture that heat and turn that into energy or is that just wasted somehow? I mean, some people have proposed this. I don't actually know what the feasibility is. I don't know that it's that important in the grand scheme of things, but perhaps? All right. And so now we have these rods, which contain things we don't

think are useful in the fuel cycle anymore. And I spent five years cooling down and bleeding off some of the radioactivity. And then the question is, what do we do with it, right? We need some place to put it that's like geologically stable and that we don't think future humans are going to stick a straw into it and drink it. So what are the options in terms of like where to put this stuff. Right. So first, let's talk about what we do in the United States. Like I said, you get these assemblies out of the spent fuel and you put them into these big containers. And right now, they just sit right at the site of production at the power plant. They have a perfect safety record. They're regulated, monitored, and you can hug them. You can sit on them. I mean, the utilities

typically don't allow people to come in and do that, but the times that nuclear advocates have been allowed, you can touch them. I mean, they're completely and perfectly safe. There are videos of these cask getting hit by a train, and the train does not survive the impact, but the cask does. There's also, they shot a missile at these casks, and it was unharmed.

I mean, it was damaged, but nothing that would open the cast, that compromises the integrity of the casks. So the way we do it currently is just fine. So can I stop you there and ask you a question? Because the perception among those who are not experts and haven't done the research in this is that nuclear waste is dangerous and that it's been spilled and that we don't have a way to contain it. And you're telling us something quite different. You're saying basically that we have the technology to seal it up in a way that we never have to worry about it again.

I read a report from Greenpeace is a quotation from their executive summary. they said, without exception, all countries reviewed were found lacking a sustainable and safe solution for managing the vast volumes of nuclear waste. This includes high-level spent fuel produced in all nuclear reactors, for which to date, all efforts to find secure and safe permanent disposal options have failed. How do you reconcile their statement with what you're telling us about the safety of nuclear waste? Are they talking about different things or is it just a different policy approach? Right. So there are two things that you address there. I want to start with the first, which is the public perception. And I think that's a very real issue. In fact, I think

that is the most important issue facing nuclear waste. It's not that there's any danger. There isn't because the hazards of the waste are physically very small and very weak to the countermeasures and systems we already have in place. The public doesn't know because they haven't been able to visit. So their perception of nuclear waste comes from Mr. Burns shoving, green barrels of goo into trees in the Simpsons and not just these big, ugly, boring concrete casks that take up the space of, you know, a fraction of a parking lot. So I think that there needs to be more transparency when it comes to nuclear waste to solve that perception issue. Greenpeace is a different thing. So Greenpeace is an anti-nuclear.

organization, which means they aren't looking for a solution. They're looking for nuclear not to exist. Their trick is to be for everything that doesn't exist yet, like geological repositories being proposed or very advanced nuclear reactors, but then turning against them as soon as they even begin to exist. So for example, Finland actually does have a geological repository and Greenpeace has fought it every step along the way and now that it exists says it's not good enough. So they start by defining everything in nuclear as not sustainable. Then they point at everything existing and proposed and called it unsustainable if it includes anything with nuclear. That's the game. I see. And something else that might give people the

sense that nuclear power produces waste which leaks out into their water table. for example, is that there have been nuclear incidents at reactors, Fukushima and Chernobyl, and these things have caused radioactive clouds, for example, or into the water. And that is something that people need to think about when it comes to nuclear power. But today we're just talking about the danger of the waste itself, right, the actual product that comes out of a nuclear power plant, which is operating in a stable and safe manner, right? Right. So you can't really understand the fear around nuclear waste if you just look at the science and the physical evidence and what's coming out of the reactor. So I think a better way to understand is when you start

looking at it in terms of a way to express nuclear fear by projecting it onto the waste. In a lot of minds, there's no difference between nuclear power and nuclear bombs and these casks of nuclear waste are seen as small nuclear bombs, which is a huge public perception problem. So again, I think if people were allowed to visit the waste like they are in other countries and see it for what it is, suddenly you can have a conversation about what do we do with a waste that deals with the physical nature of the waste and not the emotional concerns around it. All right, great, thank you. I want to talk more about the storage issues.

and Yucca Mountain and how we move forward. But first, let's take another quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

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back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor? or not. To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this.

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Get your tickets today. AXS.com. Okay, we're back and we're talking with Maddie Hilly about what to do with nuclear waste. And we're talking about the stuff that comes out of the reaction. Once you've processed it, you've gotten your fuel, maybe you've done some reprocessing. We use more of the radioactive elements. inside the rods. And now you need a place to safely keep this. And you're telling us that it's basically not a big deal. You can just wrap it up in these casks and you can even store it above

ground. Right. Exactly. So in the United States for many years, there was this project at Yucca Mountain to basically bury this stuff, to find a place to put it where we thought it was not going to be geologically a problem for many, many thousands of years and where maybe future humans weren't likely to stumble across it. What is the history of Yucca Mountain? Why did that fail? And do you think we need a similar kind of project or a totally different approach? So I think Yucca Mountain is another example of the nuclear industry trying to respond to social concerns with costly technological solutions. So Yucca Mountain, the idea is that you would put your waste in the center of the desert deep

underground so it could harm no one and no one would be near it. But we already have a system that has a perfect safety record. So Yucca Mountain, if it were to get completed, would save zero lives, protect against zero injuries, avoid zero cancer. But what it would do is give the false impression that nuclear waste is somehow uniquely dangerous industrial waste such that it needs to be in the middle of nowhere deep underground. Ironically, because of the sheer cost and effort involved in a repository like Yucca Mountain, the public fears that about nuclear waste are reaffirmed, not diffused.

So they see that the industry and government are willing to spend all this money and build this huge mega project to bury the waste. And they think, wow, my God, that must be so dangerous. Let's just not have it at all. saying it's sort of performative. It's not actually making things safer. It's just sort of trying to make people feel like something is being done. Exactly. It's trying to solve a social concern with a technological fix, which is kind of the main theme of the nuclear industry over its existence, at least in the U.S. And let me ask you another question about your claim earlier. You said that this has a perfect

safety record. And I wonder if that sort of jives with people's perception of the nuclear industry. because, you know, we hear about toxic spills. I was reading a report from the Department of Energy that says that there are millions of gallons of radioactive waste. There are huge quantities of contaminated soil and water. And they identify like 57 sites that need cleanup. Is that because this radioactive waste comes from other sources, other processes, other industries, and that the spent nuclear fuel itself has never had a safety issue? Is that the distinction?

Yes, exactly. So almost all of those things that you mentioned, including Hanford, including, you know, the Southwest. U.S. are almost exclusively heritage weapon facilities. So I would say, if anything, the creation of a commercial nuclear energy industry has made nuclear at large safer because now we know how to properly regulate and monitor waste. So those are all from the weapons project, which is a separate topic and one that I think is really important to cover. But none of that is from commercial energy production. Great. And so you were telling us that Yucca Mountain wasn't actually a great idea because it was mostly performative. It was very expensive. And plus then you had to transport this waste from where

is produced and where it could be safely stored into some other location, carrying these things like across the country. So what do you think is the best path forward for storing nuclear waste? Should we just sort of keep it where it's produced? To start off, I would just want to say that I have absolute confidence that underground storage will work physically. That's not the problem here. The problem is that the impulse misunderstands the needs and fears. So, for example, I mentioned earlier that the finish have built an underground repository, but the finish are already extremely pro-nuclear.

Their Green Party has rebelled against the Greenpeace Party line and openly supports nuclear power. So they had the comfortability with nuclear first, and the repository came next. In the U.S., we don't have that comfortability. And part of that is, I think, the lack of transparency and honesty and the discussion about waste.

So, in my opinion, nuclear waste is like co-parenting. You want absolute transparency and visitation rights. What does that mean? We need to talk about the waste and put the risk into context, which is that there's virtually no risk and that our system works great. And then we need the public to be able to visit and see that for themselves. They'll come and see that this isn't green barrels of leaky goop.

You know, for example, in the Netherlands, they store their processed waste in a centralized facility that's basically an education and art museum. Open to the public. They can walk on top of the waste with just some concrete in between them and the spicier stuff. And that's a really spicy stuff compared to what we have because it's processed. So I think that in the U.S., our first priority is to allow the public to see that nuclear waste is no big deal. Then we can have discussions about waste that deal with the physical

properties of the waste and not how do we ease social and emotional concerns. All right. Well, It's a very complex issue scientifically and the politics are even more complicated. So thanks very much, Maddie, for coming on today and walking us through some of the details of what exactly is nuclear waste, how to store it, and what the real dangers are. Really appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Daniel. Great to chat. So that was my conversation with Maddie Hilly, who was a very strong advocate for commercial nuclear power and feels that the waste is something that we can manage.

I thought that it was important, however, to hear from folks on the other side of the issue. So I reached out to representatives from Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here are some excerpts for my interviews with them. Okay, and so I'm very pleased to welcome Jan Haverkamp. He's a senior expert in nuclear energy and energy policy at Greenpeace, and he is a master's degree in environmental science. Jan, thanks very much for taking some time to talk to us. Well, I'm very happy to be there.

It's an afternoon here, beautiful weather, and for you, a very early morning. So my first question for you is, what is your assessment of the safety record of various producers of sort of the most dangerous highest level waste? We heard from an advocate for a nuclear power who told us that the commercial nuclear power industry has a, quote, perfect safety record when it comes to spent fuel. Is that how you would characterize it? Well, exactly, I mean, we've had a lot of incidents in the, for instance, in the reprocessing industry, which is dealing with spent fuel. One of the most horrible ones is probably the Topamura incident where too much of high-level material was thrown together, where we had an explosion. I mean, those incidents you don't want to see often, but we also have the track record of La Hague in France, the track record of Selafield, and the track record of Mayak in Russia. There is a lot to tell about that.

There is so much to tell about that, that I don't want to go now into all of them. But the management of spent nuclear fuel is not an easy job to do. It's technically very complex and in technical, very complex. Things go sometimes wrong. Luckily enough, most of the time, those are minor incidents where we deal with a minor contamination of people that are involved. But we have seen some very, very large incidents like the Myagnon. 1957 incident or a Keishdeme incident, as it's also known, which is probably the third largest

emission or radioactive substances from the industry. Of course, you can argue whether the Russian nuclear industry is a civil nuclear industry, because it's a hybrid industry, military civil, but that's a discussion you can have. It's high-level radioactive waste is a very complex issue, and I think slogans are not really benefit to a discussion about him. So help us understand the challenge here. Why not just store the fairly small volume of nuclear fuel at the reactors where it's produced? So you don't have to transport it. You don't worry about loss and damage during transport. Why don't you store them at the reactors or at facilities like Covra in the Netherlands? What's the danger there? The small amount is at the moment almost half a million, so it's 480,

490,000 tons worldwide. So it's not that small of amount. Here in the Netherlands, we have 110 cubic meters, which is not that very much at Kovra. And I think storage of spend nuclear fuel temporarily is basically the default option that a majority of the operators is now choosing, and that's done in different qualities. One of my headaches last night was shelling of the South Virginia nuclear power station and a shell that was falling next to the dry casket storage there. You'll hear my sigh.

I mean, that has been a few hours off. sweating to find out what the impact was. It was just far enough away. So I'm happy about that. There is no incident there. In the Netherlands, for instance, at Kovara, we've chosen for a very large and very well-protected, engineered storage space to Habog. And I think that that is probably at the moment the state of the art of how to temporarily store high-level radioactive waste. Now, that's not spent fuel because the Netherlands are reprocessing. So that's vitrified waste, for which we are sure that it will have to be kept out of the environment for the next few hundred thousand years.

Temporary storage for that reason is only a temporary solution. In this case, until the year 213, when it is supposed to close, a decision about what to do with the waste then is in the Netherlands not going to be taken before the year 2100. That is probably also your great-great-grandchildren that will have to take the decision for something where they have had no benefit of at all. You already notice there's a few things at play here. In principle, if we have waste like this, it is better to store it with as little transport as possible, dry storage on site.

But you need to take care that also, and we protect against extreme circumstances, as we now see in Zaporizier friends. Is that why you describe it as temporary storage? Because you don't think this is sustainable for 500,000 or a million years? This is designed for above 100 years. And you need to do something with it then. The choice of options is at this moment not very large. Most of the people working the sector talk now about deep geological disposal as the preferred option. My remark is then always if it works.

The other options that we see now are a fully engineered solution for the long term, but that is not what is Kovra. Covra is an engineered solution for 100 years. Just to clarify, I can ask you, why does storage at the reactor or in Covra only work for 100 years? What happens after 100 years that it's no longer possible to leave these things where they are now? Well, the concrete that we have there of the building is not for eternity. It's been designed to withstand, for instance, severe weather impacts, tornadoes for a period of about 100 years and not beyond. At the moment that we talk about long-term storage of this way, so we talk about hundreds of thousands of years, there's not something you can just uphold.

You would have to have people take over the responsibility time by time to upgrade the installation, to repair the installation, so that it is still able to withstand natural impacts or malevolent impacts, and that is a very long responsibility. You could theoretically, of course, think about engineering something that will not need that, but that is something in which there is not very much research done at this very moment. So engineered, fully engineered solutions are not really taken as a serious option right now within the industry. And the last option that I'm now only seeing is extremely deep boreholes.

Then we talk about three, four, five thousand meters deep. There is research ongoing at this moment into that option, but it's still in its infancy. And for that reason, yeah, what is happening in COVID is really is temporary storage. And what is happening in most other cases like Philipsburg in Germany or we see also in Apparisia, meaning in Ukraine, or what we see in the Chernobyl, a spent fuel site that was set up there by Holtek. That is all temporary storage places. They're designed as temporary storage places. So something that pro-nuclear advocates often comment is that the waste that's produced by nuclear power is toxic, but temporarily that these things will decay, that in 500,000 years or a million years, it will no longer be toxic, whereas the mercury and lead and cadmium.

produced in other industries is toxic forever. What's your response to that kind of argument? I worked on Mercury who waste in the Czech Republic when I was living there with my toxic campaigner that dreams Czech Republic. That's also a headache. I mean, if one headache is a headache, it doesn't mean that something else is not a headache. I find it a very shabby argument in the discussion. That is, yes, that is not eternal.

It's a risk that endures for, well, the peak is in a few thousand years, in about 24,000 years. it's not such an issue any longer, but I hesitate taking people seriously who think that that is not such a problem in human terms. Geology is an interesting science, but it has very little relevance for a human lifetime. Or it has a lot of relevance for human lifetime, but not when we talk about times. And even if we talk about low and mid-level waste, I mean, we've got in categories that need to be kept out of the environment for about 100 years, 300 years, 700 years. It depends a little bit on the isotope. Even there, two, three generations is a very long time.

And to guarantee political stability for those times, guarantee that you can keep that safe is a piece of homework that we, of course, do not only face for radioactive waste, also for other toxic waste, but it's a piece of homework of our generation that is going farther than we currently are able to manage properly, say the least. So for that reason, I mean, my grandchildren are the loveliest of kids, but their generation is going to have to clean up a lot of rubbish that we've been made.

So here in the United States, we've seen some nuclear power plants close without replacements by new facilities, for example, Indian Point in New York. and a lot of the power that was produced by that plant is now being produced by natural gas, which emits, of course, lots of carbon. What's your advice for policymakers who want to decarbonize the grid and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and need something to bridge the gap between what solar and wind can provide and what the grid needs? What's your advice for how to close that gap? The first advice would have been started earlier with renewables.

I mean, we've been delculating for Greenpeace since 2003, most of the first. first version, the so-called energy revolution scenarios where the R is between brackets. And that's because we have been only calculating technical evolutions conservatively, but we are well aware that thinking that way needs a political revolution. Now, if we look at the scenarios that have been developed over the time until 2015 when we stopped producing them, and we look at more recent scenarios, the goals that we need to set to keep within the Paris Agreement 1.5 degree mean that we need to speed up development

of truly clean renewable sources very fast anyway. There is just no getting around that. And that's point one what needs to be told. And if I look at policies of different countries and I look at the policies of countries that have a higher amount of nuclear in their mixes, I see that the developments towards a 100% renewable grid is slowing down there. I mean, an example is Finland, where the development of solar, but especially wind,

where the heavy huge potential has been slowed down enormously by the fact that they were focusing on the finalization of Hulu-1-2-3. Now, that took 12, 13 years longer than they expected. That means also that the development of renewables there stole for about. 13 years. But are you suggesting that we can use pure renewables, just solar and wind, as a way to provide energy for the grid? Renewables is why the energy is solar and wind. I mean, but I think we can come to a zero fully renewable energy provision in 2015. That is still possible. It needs a lot of work with that's possible. Now, you said, well, before we're getting there, there might be a gap.

That depends on the grid structure you have. It depends on where you are. We've seen similar discussions in Germany, where the closed capacity of nuclear has been surpassed with produced capacity by largely wind and solar, but also a good fraction of biogas. And that appears to be possible. It appeared to be possible to phase out sensibly and phase in renewables in a sensible way. What went wrong there is that there has been a large hesitants to close down coal. And we see now that Germany has to speed up, even it's already relatively, well, no, it had slowed down, to be very honest, but it's relatively high development of renewable energy resources. Because it has slowed down, they can do it still. And that is also

the steps that we see now in the Ukraine war and the gas problems that Germany is facing. We see there especially an increase in development of their renewable resources. And that's possible. for the United States the choice for for fracking gas was I think a politically very conscious one I don't think at the moment it was the most wise choice when it happened and the fact that we now see gas increasing gas use increasing in the United States when nuclear power station switches off here and there as you mentioned has more to do with past policies than that it has to do with a decision to replace nuclear by gas and I think think that it makes sense to look at the issue from a total grid perspective and prepare also for the coming years of an increase in renewable production, a grid that can deal with it, a storage that comes with it with more dispatchable sources like biogas. There will be a tiny niche for hydrogen in it. There will be a good niche for in it, I suppose, for battery storage that needs attention at this very moment. Thanks very much. That's very helpful. I really appreciate

your time and your thoughts on the issues. You're welcome. So you can hear that Jan has a very different view about the long-term dangers of spent nuclear fuel than Maddie did, and specifically whether storage at the plant, where the waste is created, is a temporary solution on the timescale of hundreds of years, or a long-term solution on the timescale of thousands of years. Dealing with storage over thousands or millions of years is very tricky, not just scientifically, but politically. Where does it go? Who would accept it and why? What promises could we make to them?

I spoke to Jeffrey Fettus at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a senior attorney for nuclear climate and clean energy and the former assistant attorney general of New Mexico. And I asked him about the prospects for finding a place to keep this stuff. Here's what he had to say. That is a terrific question. And I love the way you asked it because I think you're asking the right way as you're starting at what are the prospects for it and how do we get there. And I want to give a little piece of history to your listeners that I hope will be really helpful in centering them on where the agreements are and where the disagreements are. And I'll start with Yucca because everybody turns to Yucca Mountain and says, oh, it was a disaster or it was all politics or

science was bad or all of the fights over it. And NRDC has a different view. And RDC has a different view than reductive or easily breaking it down into it was one thing that killed Yucca. And for too long, too many industry advocates conflated support for the Yucca Mountain Repository is support for any deep geological repository. That's just wrong. I'll do a fast history and then I hope to get you to a narrative that really centers you on and your listeners to these are where the agreements are and here are the challenges. So in 1957, the National Academy of sciences came to a conclusion that spent nuclear fuel at high-level waste, and we had both of it by 1957.

Not much of the spent nuclear fuel yet, but we certainly had high-level waste at Hanford and Savannah River. They came to a conclusion, we have to get this stuff into a deep geologic repository, or repositories, plural. And that's kind of been the consensus ever since, and it remains the consensus to this day, that we can't shoot it into the sun, we can't send it under the sea, The sort of holy grail for nuclear true believers was eventually we're going to have hundreds and hundreds of fast reactors that we can reprocess the waste, and that hasn't worked out,

and NRDCs no suggestion that it ever will work out. But in 1987, Congress short-circuited the process of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and said, well, this looks really expensive and problematic, so Nevada gets the short straw, and it's all going to go to Yucama. Then we spent about 20 years in a ferocious fight with Nevada and many others objecting to how Yucca was decided upon and what its technical qualities were. There was a one of those classically boring D.C. August commissions created called the Blue Ribbon Commission for America's Nuclear Future. It ran from 2010 to 2012 and it came out with three really important again consensus bipartisan observations that remain true then and remain true now and hopefully can guide the way forward but they've still

left one thing off the table ready this is what they found they said we've got to have a repository way or repositories we've just got to have a repository there's no other way to do this to store this waste and then eventually dispose of it permanently in a way that's morally and technically suitable. Number two, reprocessing isn't going to solve things in any time in our lifetime, not for years. And number three, we've got to get consent-based siting. We've got to get the consent of the folks of where the waste is eventually going to go. Places, plural, we think, but we've got to find a way to get consent. And NRDC agrees with that.

And what the Blue Ribbon Commission didn't do was talk about how to get consent. They didn't describe how do we arrive at consent and what does it look like? And so if you look at where we are now, this is why your question was so thoughtful, because you asked it in the right way, which was, what's the prognosis? Like, what's the chance? Where are we? Well, right now, we still can't get consent. Nevada is never going to give consent.

There's been no indication over 40 years the state will give consent, and nor should they. as far as NRDC is concerned. They were chosen based on political weakness, not on the technical merits of the site. Those bedrock environmental laws don't apply to the federal-based. No state will ever be okay with that, and this has been bipartisan. Right now, the two efforts to cite consolidated interim storage sites

are in New Mexico and Texas. Both governors, as different as they could be, Governor Abbott in Texas, and Governor Lujan Grisham in New Mexico, have expressed ferocious non-consent. We're going to keep ending up in this cul-de-sac until we deal with consent and really figure out how it works. We think Congress should pass a law removing the exemption for nuclear waste

from bedrock environmental laws. Right now, the actual organic law that governs the nuclear industry exempts them from environmental laws. And we think once that exemption's gone, EPA can set nationwide safety radioactive protection standards and EPA in the states could set ability on their own limits on how much and on what terms the waste would come. And then we can move much faster than what we've ever done on nuclear waste on siting because the power dynamics will be so different.

So there's my explanation of nuclear waste on how we can go forward. Wonderful. Thank you. So your focus then is on establishing consent and setting up the situation so that things can be monitored and regulated. So is it your opinion then that the technical solution, exists that we can put this stuff underground fairly safely where it can sit for thousands or millions of years and mostly not harm the people living above the surface, that it's essentially mostly a political and policy issue right now? That's a terrific question. I think it should

remain absolutely foremost in everybody's mind that this is a profound technical challenge like few others. I mean, you're a scientist and you're asking an extraordinarily difficult thing of everybody from engineers to archaeologists and anthropologists to suggest that something can be safe or something beyond the scale of human history. It's a profound technical challenge by any measure. And do I think it's simple? Do I think that the scientific defensibility

of any particular site is going to be a straightforward process? No, I don't. One of the things that's been most interesting as a lawyer to work on these issues is I get so much history from so many brilliant people from geologists to physicists to engineers to archaeologists and anthropologists who looked at so many of these sites from Lyons to Tennessee to the salmon site in Mississippi to Yucca. And from what I understand, Yucca looked as a site much more promising in the 1980s than it did by the middle of the 90s. The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board by the early 2000s, they suggested that the technical case for Yucca was weak to moderate at best. and that was a site that had been studied for 20 years.

So I think the technical issues or any of this going forward are going to outstrip most other decisions we make as a society. They're just that difficult because it is, it's a million-year challenge. It's a challenge beyond the scale of human history. But I think the thing that is so apparent to us after 60 years of failure to get to even interim storage sites that are not just at the point of generation, We have interim storage sites, by the way, that are technically working, which is at reactor sites. They are still there.

We haven't had a dreadful accident yet in this country, and that's good. And let's hope we can keep the NRC on its job to ensure we think, by the way, the NRC should do better and require the fuel get moved from densely packed pools into dry storage faster. That's a safety issue. All right. Thank you very much to all of our guests and interviewees for sharing their thoughts. And to the listeners for hanging on for this extra long episode, I hope that gave you a taste for the technical side of nuclear waste, what it is, how it's made, how dangerous it is, as well as a flavor of the political complexities of solving the problem of long-term storage. All of this goes to inform policymakers who have to make the really tough decisions in a changing landscape and a very hard to predict future. Thanks very much for listening and tune in next time.

Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ninth, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe. Find out how to end.

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