Nuclear Waste - What's the Solution?

it's a pretty serious one. It's one that we have to lend serious consideration too, so that we can find a solution that doesn't know or radiate people unnecessarily or even necessarily. Yes, we talked about some of the waste facilities that are currently in existence and the main kind that we would really like to have that is currently not in existent. So today I figured we'd take a little more forward looking, uh look on the show called

Forward Thinking. Maybe a little more a forward glancing look, a forward looking glance. How about we just sort of explore the different options that may or may not be open to us as far as dealing with nuclear waste. Right, Well, let's do a little bit of recap on the last episode. So one of the things we learned is that not

all nuclear waste is the same exactly. So the vast majority of the nuclear waste that is produced, or radioactive waste is what's called low level waste or intermediate level waste. And this is about nineties seven percent of all nuclear waste generated, but only five percent of the radioactivity. Right,

So what is this stuff? Well, it's stuff that's been in contact with radioactive material and has picked up some radioactivity because of that, either it's radioactive dust or the radioactive material itself has started to cause some ionizing reactions. So intermediate level waste tends to be stuff that's been in contact with radioactive waste for a while, like filters, parts of a reactor, this kind of thing. I think that probably also stuff like like filings from uranium mills

fall into that general probably. Yeah, this gets kind of weird because different countries classify things in slightly different ways. But then low level waste would include stuff that's had less intense contact with radioactive material but still has come into contact with it. So tools, uh, protective clothing and gear, that kind of thing that might fall into that category, and we have to find ways to deal with all

of it. Yeah, these lower level wastes, they are still somewhat radioactive, so we do have to be careful in how we're dealing with them. Yeah, you don't want your children to swallow them, right, so disposal, take that Take that protective over you know, protective apron out of your mouth, Jimmy. Yeah, Well, some gloves are more delicious than others, I guess. So anyway, the low level waste is not all that dangerous. It's not good, but it's it's not something it's not our

main concerns. It's the sort of stuff that we can safely disposed of in uh in a essentially a trench or pit and covered with with soil, and it will be uh, it will be secure enough where we don't have to worry about that affecting people. Yeah, I guess the intermediate level waste is intermediate. But what comes after intermediate high level waste, high level waste, that is what is a big problem. Yeah, we're not talking about pants. No, it's not a high level waste. It's not an eighties

genes kind of thing. Now, we're talking about waste that is highly radioactive. This is the stuff that makes up the radioactivity, even though it's only three percent of the volume of waste. Yeah, So for the purpose of this podcast, we might just say high level waste to include all the things were about to mention. But some people make a distinction between spent nuclear fuel and what they then call high level waste. On top of that, high level

waste being what has been processed out of spent fuel. Yeah, so if you get if you have spent fuel, yeah, you have spent fuel, you do some reprocessing of it, so you can recapture uranium and plutonium from that spin fuel that have not been burned. Yeah, because as it turns out, not very much of it gets consumed in these nuclear reactors. It doesn't It doesn't take much for a nuclear rod, for example, to become inefficient, so it's no longer heating up water to the levels that we

needed to. But there's still plenty of uranium and plutonium in there, and those are important resources. So if we're able to reprocess it, we can recapture that uranium and plutonium. But there's gonna be some stuff left over that is not going to be useful for us, and it's really radioactive. That is high level waste. So we're probably going to be using high level waste to refer to both that

and the spent nuclear fuel. Just keep in mind that there are other people and organizations that do differentiate between the two. There are different things. They're just for the practical purpose. They're both very radioactive and very dangerous. So alright, so we talked about our last podcast. We mentioned yucka mountain in Nevada was going to be a geological repository.

This place where we would be able to put spent nuclear fuel or high level waste or both uh and have it safely locked away so that it could not hurt people for ten thousand years? Was really the idea or longer? Right? And we mentioned these kind of off the cuff and mentioned them as well, this is what is generally agreed upon to be the best idea. So so why is that? What's going on with these things? Exactly?

So the reason why it's considered to be the best idea is because it has a whole lot of separation between us and nuclear waste. But let's talk about what how many either actually are in existence? Because that's a real sticking point, right, That's right. There are zero currently in operation for high level waste or for spent fuel. Yeah, so why why are these uh, these facilities, these deep geological repositories ideal for high level waste. Well, I mean again,

it keeps it really far away from people. It's you know, we're talking about a finding a place on Earth where we can bury this stuff where you're you're not too worried about the geological features changing dramatically over the next hundred thousand years. You want it to remain as stable as possible because you want it to contain that nuclear waste. So you don't want to put it in a place where there's going to be a lot of like earthquakes, your volcanic activity, and that both of those would be

very bad. Yeah, you don't want to have any any chance of or you want to minimize the chances of any sort of breach. You want it to be safe, Like, you don't want it to be in a really tropical region. You don't want there to be a lot of water present, So you want to find an arid or semi arid kind of area where water is not as big a problem.

You want to be able to isolate the the chamber wherever you're putting the stuff, the repository itself from any water, whether it's runoff from from rain or if it's a water that's underground, you want to make sure it's safe from all of that so it doesn't contaminate any those water sources, which could then go go on to enter into various ecosystems and contaminate them. That would be bad as well. So you mentioned that there were zero in

operation for high level waste. Are their geological repositories for something else, maybe intermediate level waste? Yeah, there are three in operation for low and intermediate level waste. Uh. They are found in Finland and Sweden. And there's one in operation for trans uranic waste in the USA at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant or WHIP. We will be revisiting

the WHIP facility later on. Yeah. So uh we mentioned in the last podcast, but just as a reminder, trans uranic waste is one of those terms that is used in the United States but not really widely used elsewhere. It's generally talking about waste elements with atomic numbers that are higher than uranium. It's a byproduct of nuclear research, weapons production, and power production. Uh. And it's mostly stuff like tools, residue gear and usually only contains a small

amount of actually radioactive material. It's still dangerous, but it's not considered as dangerous as high level waste. It was used for the waste isolation pilot plant because you didn't have to go whole hog into high level waste in your in your pilot program. You know, you want to test the pilot program, but you don't want to throw everything at it right at once and then risk having a catastrophic failure with the worst stuff on the planet. Okay,

so what's the idea behind the pilot plant. Well, it's a facility outside of Carl's Bad New Mexico, and uh, it's meant to be a ten thousand years safe facility. And we talked a little bit in the last episode

about the kinds of things that those facilities include. Um, what I find really fascinating and kind of charming about the waist Isolation Pilot Plant is that it furthermore features a number of magnets, radar reflectors, and forty eight stone and concrete markers weighing a hundred and five tons each that are carved with warnings in seven languages and human faces expressing horror in order to drive people away from

this facility. For years, because the idea being that how can we protect and we'll talk more about this later, but how can we protect future generations from something as dangerous as nuclear waste? Knowing that in ten thousand years time, think about the last ten thousand years. I mean, we don't have any languages that date from that far back, So how would we even know what people how people

are communicating within ten thousand years? Uh? And UH. One of those languages that was mentioned was Navajo because that was the native language of the area, UM, which I thought was very interesting that that was one of the represented languages on these markers. So yeah, very interesting. And again we'll revisit that because there's some fascinating things to talk about in that respect. On top of that, Uh, this year, two thousand fourteen, there were some incidents early

this year at the waste isolation pilot plant. One of those was that there was an incident on February fourt fourteen, so Valentine's Day, there was a radiation leak underground. Uh. Within a couple of weeks there was detection of airborne radioactive particles within a half mile from the facility and ultimately, or at least initially thirteen workers were tested positive as

having radiation exposure. But just I mean, that's serious stuff. Obviously, you're talking about a facility designed to contain this stuff and there was a containment failure. Um. One of the reasons why this is a really serious issue is that the if you listen to our last episode, you heard us talk about the yuck A Mountain project and how political pressures have really set that back to the point where it may not ever be used for what it

was intended. There are some people who are saying we should probably look at WHIP as instead the next geological repository and upgraded so that we could put high level waste there, because now we've got this pilot program. But with this radiation leak that really brings that into question too, Like is it a good idea when we're talking about a low level or intermediary level type of radiation having a leakage problem? What happens when we put the high

level stuff there? If there was a leakage problem with that, it could be even more serious. I mean, any radiation leakage problem is serious already, but when you're talking about catastrophic exactly, Yeah, you could have some some truly devastating effects, especially if that radiation gets leaked into the surrounding ecosystem. So that's kind of leads into the same discussion we had last time. The political issues are huge, Like one, you have to figure out where on Earth are the

prime real estate places for these kind of things. Right, Well, that's not so much a political issue, that's sort of a scientific no. But that that's the first problem you have. It is like, let's just identify where like we obviously we can't put these anywhere. We have to put them someplace that is geologically ideal for the for a repository. That's that's problem one. Yeah, and and even yuck a

moutain some problems with that. I mean, people were arguing that it was too close to fault lines, and yeah that there were people who are arguing there was too much tectonic activity. There were people who are arguing that there was there were too many cracks in the rock itself, and of nine potential facilities as the absolute best one. So nothing is probably going to be absolutely perfect, right, And so first you have to to pick the places

that you could potentially put this stuff. Then you have to convince people that that's what needs to go there, and if you live near those places, like we mentioned in the last episode, you might have that not in my backyard reaction where you do not want this dangerous stuff put near you, and very human and understandable reaction. It's also one that's problematic because then what do you do with all the stuff that's accumulating. So um, yeah,

these are really big issues. There's also just the question of how do you get the nuclear waste from where it's generated to where it's supposed to go? Right, Yeah, it opens up the possibility of having a nuclear waste transportation accident. There's actually debate going on in Scotland right now about whether local plans should be allowed to consolidate waste prior to permanent disposal. And you know it's no one likes car accidents. No one really likes plutonium involved

car accidents, right yeah. Doc Brown told us that that's a bad idea. Fortunately, as far as I know, I don't think there's ever been a radioactive waste transportation accident. So they have them pretty well locked down and it's

an extremely expensive and paperwork filled process. Yeah, it's actually one of those where you know, obviously if you're going to be transporting something like that, you have to do it in a way that is incredibly well coordinated and extremely secret, because you don't want to publicize when this dangerous stuff is going to be out in the open, one site to another dinner bell for potential nuclear weapons makers. Yeah, exactly. So it's it's certainly one of those things that is

a high, high priority activity whenever it does happen. Uh. And well we'll talk a little bit more about the technicalities involved in that later on. Yeah, So let's instead of looking at this so that the repository was sort of the the big solution that people settled on a couple of decades ago. Was saying, all right, this one sounds like this is the best idea, And as it turns out, there are a lot of human problems that make it hard to implement this idea. But what about

other ideas of how to deal with nuclear waste? What about just crammin it ne garage somewhere. Well, that's what we're doing right now. Then that, as it turns out, is not necessarily a long term solution. Uh. And while I am being facetious by saying that's what we're doing right now. What we are doing right now is not that far from cramming it into a garage. I mean, it's like a really nice garage. It's a garage that was meant to hold nuclear waste, but not indefinitely. It

was meant to hold it for you know, three decades. Yeah. So yeah, long term above ground storage that was investigated by a lot of countries, including the United States, and and was eventually said, you know, this is not a good idea. It's just not safe enough. It's not uh, it's not a permanent solution. It's intermediate at best, so we need something else. In fact, the United States looked into it as being a potential long term solution and then said, yeah, we gotta find a different way. So

that's off the table. Okay, what about this idea of reprocessing. This has come up before that. Apparently some countries reprocess spent nuclear fuel to see what they can do with it. Now, is this something that's going to get rid of the high level waste problem? Absolutely not. This is what generates high level waste. Okay, how does it do that? So

you've got the spent nuclear fuel? Uh? And we mentioned before that when you use nuclear fuel, you only use up about two percent of it, especially in solid nuclear fuel. There are different types of reactors, Like if you were using liquid nuclear fuel, it's a different thing, but your standards solid nuclear rod, you use up about two percent of the fuel and the other remains unburned, which means that you know, if you're just gonna toss that, you're

you're losing. Yeah. Now, the thing is that uranium is actually not that expensive compared to the process of reprocessing uranium. So if it's cheaper to buy new uranium than it is to reprocess the stuff you've already used, guess what people do. They buy new uranium because there's no incentive to reprocess the stuff you already have if it's more

expensive than just going out and buying the new stuff. Now, around the late two thousand's, the price of uranium started to climb and that caused a lot of countries to look into this reprocessing uh technique, which means they try to reclaim as much of the uranium and plutonium that still exists in that nuclear fuel as possible, And about of it is uranium and about another percent is plutonium, and the remaining three is this stuff they can't use.

That's the high level waste that we've been talking about. That's the stuff that's really dangerous, and it's gonna be dangerous for a long long time. So we've got to figure out what to do. So even if you do reprocess it so that you can use the stuff again in some other nuclear fuel reaction, whatever that may be, you still at the end of the day have stuff left over that you have to figure out what are you gonna do with it. So it's not it's not

a solution of getting rid of nuclear waste. Um, it's just how do you keep on using the stuff you've got for as long as you can, uh, rather than buying new uranium? So not not a not a long term solution, and it and it doesn't completely solve the problem, and not at all. No, you still have the problem

of the high level waste. And eventually, you know, eventually you're going to get to a point where it will cost more to reprocess whatever fuel you have than to just go out and get new stuff, unless you're somehow re enriching it and recombining it with other reprocessed fuels.

Unless there were regulations that were forcing companies to do this, it might not be anyone would choose to do right, and ultimately it's not a big environmental improvement over just storing spent nuclear fuel in pools, which is what we're doing right now. We're keeping them in pools for fifty years before we can do anything else with it. Well, I have a different solution that involves putting nuclear waste in waters. What's that, It's called quote disposal. Let's see

a k A. Dumping radioactive waste directly into the ocean. Yeah, because it's not like there's anything going on, and it's not like there are complex ecosystems or worldwide movements of large trade winds, giant currents that could carry nuclear particles thousands of miles onto the shores of distance. Okay, okay, let's back off now. Surely nobody would actually do this, right,

It's just one of those. Clearly, this is crazy and no one would ever do nobody except like a dozen different countries including the United States, Russia and the former Soviet Union and the UK, Japan and a bunch of other European countries. Uh, there are there are dump sites in the oceans all over the world. Now here's the here's the big thing to keep in mind, as far as we know, it's not like people have been dumping high level waste into the ocean. This is a dump.

They've been dumping intermediate and low level waste into the ocean. Still, there were decades when this was done, decades if people began to get increasingly uncomfortable over time. So since the nineteen nineties, international agreements have banned dumping radioactive waste into the ocean. But so we we've been doing this since what like the sixties that I think since the forties maybe, and then it wasn't until the nineties that we all got it together to be offended by. We had a

lot going on in the eighties. Um, there was like a lot going on that you aren't aware of. I mean, I mean, I was was teaching America how to laugh on Saturday Night Live, I believe you. And the DVR didn't even exist yet, so you had to watch that. Yeah, this is uh so it seems crazy to me even though this is so. We are talking about lower level wastes, but it's not that incredibly dangerous high level waste. If they were doing that, that would be absolutely insane. Yeah,

this lower level waste. Supposedly, from what I've read, most authorities have said it's probably not really dangerous. It's probably not significantly harming ecosystems because it's contained and it's the lower level waste. The water is a very good shield

against radiation. You know, you have to have several You wouldn't want to get right next to any sort of radioactive source, even in the water, but ten meters away it's a you know, if there's ten meters of water around this radioactive stuff, then it's a very good shielding unit for it would away in air. Yes, So it's uh, you know, there's that to consider as well. Depending upon the dumping site, there could be a minimal impact on

certain ecosystems. But it's still something that I would be very much not happy with, especially if I were, like, I don't know someone who actually came across one of these things, but that's never happened, right, Speaking of that, Yeah, I read in an article in the Wall Street Journal this wonderful paragraph quote. Commercial fishermen have at times hauled up waste containers from various parts of the Massachusetts Bay

home to a dump site. Frank Mirarchi, a seventy year old retired commercial fisherman said his catches occasionally included nuclear junk containers. After one such discovery, Mr Mirarchi said government officials checked him and his crew for radiation but didn't find problems. Comforting. It's so once again, I do want to remind you, it's not it's not like that they're dumping the high level waste. It could be a lot worse.

And they're not not dumping anything now yeah yeah, yeah, right, right, but just previously dumping the high level waste probably well, it's far as we know. I'm I mean, honestly, I don't know what the Soviet Union was doing, but I'm not sure even the Soviet Union was aware of what the Soviet Union was doing. That part of the problem. It's the former Soviet Union. Yeah, But in any case, so it's not like we've got high level way strolling

around in the ocean as far as we know. But still bad idea, don't ever do that again, humans, Just that still please dispose of the stuff properly. And why that seems to be the wide agreement. You know that the nations around the world have said, you know what, you're right, are bad. We won't do that anymore. Yeah, So let's look at another alternative. How about really really deep holes in the ground. So when we talk about stuff like yuck A Mountain, there you're talking about going

down like a thousand feet yeah, three of rock. So the ideal thing about yucka Mountain is that it was supposed to be like under three of rock, but also three above the water table. So it's not going to be leaking into the groundwater that you're going to pull up in your well or that's going to get into the ecosystem, and it's going to be really far separated

from the surface. But you could actually if you weren't trying to hollow out a full facility with large storage spaces and stuff like that, you could probably go a lot deeper. Right sure, I think you're you're dancing around a bore hole. There. A bore hole indeed where you you bore a hole into the earth which doesn't involve speaking like you know, ben Stein at the ground or anything,

and actually involves drilling. Instead of like three d or a thousand feet, this would be in terms of kilometers deep, so like maybe two to five kilometers below the surface, which is not unprecedented we have drilled as far down as six kilometers for things like oil. So if we were to identify appropriate areas where the strata UH were amenable to the kind of things we need to do, like dump nuclear waste down it, you can totally do that.

You could, at least in theory, bore a hole really far down, lower the nuclear waste into it, sometimes between depending upon the type of hole. We've seen estimates between a hundred and two hundred metric tons could fit in a single borehole. And you're you're not just gonna just gonna plunk it in there, like you know, lowering it would be the best thing. You just drop it. I don't know. I don't think so. I would consider one

of the one of the big concerns. I'm jumping ahead here, but one of the big concerns is that what happens if nuclear waste were to get caught on the way down, Like you're you're lowering containers and you're not just pouring out green glowing sludge teenage midget total style into it, but you're lowering containers down, and if it were to get stuck on something on the way down, then it wouldn't be at the appropriate depth the agreed upon death Like this is all based upon estimations of how long

will this place remain safe because we need a long term solution. Oh yeah, and also, I mean you're you're going to be dropping casks, are lowering casks. It's it's all going to be very well protected. I'm sure before it even gets to the boreholes. Yeah, so you get down you lower it down there, about a hundred to two hundred metric tons of spent nuclear fuel could go down there. The U S generates at least two thousand

metric tons of this a year. Yeah, there's uh so, the Nuclear Energy Institute estimates that we produce between about two thousand and metric tons of spent nuclear fuel per year. But that is just the spent nuclear fuel, that is not all of the high level waste, right, and then yeah, when you're talking about high level waste, you're talking more like seven thousand metric tons per year. So anyway, for just the spent nuclear fuel, you would need ten to

twenty bore holes every year to meet that demand. So you have to you'd have to dig between ten and twenty every single year to do this kilometers down and then for the high level waste, you're talking thirty five to seventy additional ones to handle all that stuff. Um, And there are some big concerns, Like I said, what happens if it gets stuck on the way down it's not the right depth, and that's a problem. How do you how do you unstick it safely so that you

can lower it all the way to the base. Another is that you have to develop an appropriate seal for the top of this borehole so that it is sealed properly. It's not gonna let any any particulates out, and it's not gonna easily let anyone else into it, whether on accident or by design. Um. You know, you have to make sure that the well casing is really strong so that it can withstand any kind of shifting. I mean, obviously you know the ground does tend to shift every

now and again. You don't want to put these anywhere close to uh an area that has a lot of earthquake activity, or any earthquake activity. Um. You have to be really careful about groundwater again, knowing that any sort of high level waste that's generating heat could cause groundwater to start to swell. Out of the ground. That's a big issue because that's gonna alter an ecosystem. Even if there's no radiation leakage, it changes the eCos tom itself.

So one of the other issues with boreholes is that theoretically, if you were to use a geological repository, you could design in such a way that should we come up with a technology where spent nuclear fuel would be a great resource to have, you could go and retrieve it. Not so much with bore holes. Nope. Yeah, so that would be another potential downside. Now, granted, this is saying it's a potential downside in the future which may or may not ever come up with a great way to

use spent nuclear fuel. So you're like, well, okay, but we that doesn't solve the problem we have right now. Yeah, we don't as a global population want to be that that person who just hoards craft materials that they might never use again, except those craft materials could totally kill you. Yeah, right, have the world's most dangerous junk drawer. Yeah, I see where you're going to that. Okay, but surely there are other wonderful ways we could cram nuclear waste into the

Earth's crust. There are other ways, and don't copy surely, I'm so sorry. Okay, how about rock melting? Rock melting? It sounds like a B fift two song, but it totally isn't. Um rock melting. Yeah, awesome, fantastic. I'm not participating in this. So the idea is to melt wastes into adjacent rock to create eventually a solid mass that's

radioactively stable. So think of it this way. You've got these casks of radioactive material that heat up pretty hot, you know, especially if you've got a whole bunch of them together and you put them in an area where they're surrounded by rocks. They eventually heat the rocks up to molten status, and the rocks end up kind of and end up being this gooey thing all around them.

You've got molten radioactive lava essentially, but as it cools, it solidifies, and that radioactive material would in theory be fairly uniformly dispersed throughout that solid mass. So instead of this concentrate did radioactive source, you have a more dispersed radioactive source that isn't as dangerous over time, and it's also again deep underground. When you do this, you don't just pour it out over rocks on the ground. That also somehow sounds like it would be less likely to

get back out, like if it's incorporated into the rock structure. Yeah, you wouldn't be able to get back at the stuff easily in a way that it's again, it's a way where you're if you were to use this method, you're not going to be using that for fuel again anytime in the foreseeable future. Russian scientists even proposed digging a deep borehole and then putting plutonium in it and then immobilizing it through the sound use of nuclear explosions. Finally, yeah,

the way to put bomba under the earth. But after much discussion, it turns out they thought this was a crazy idea because it who knows what it could do to the surrounding environment and water table if you were to detonate a nuclear reaction just to a mobile ice some nuclear waste underground. So um, it was considered eventually to be what they call a bad idea and didn't didn't pursue it. Well, I've got a bad idea that might be even worse. What if you did pretty much

the same thing but with ice instead. Of rock. So you put a big, old hot container of radioactive sludge on top of an ice sheet and just let it melt straight like ice cube glacier or something like those things that we're already having a huge problem with melting. It becomes in sino man and uh to be as

bad to let out of the ice. To be fair, a lot of these discussions of using ice sheets happened before we had some major major problems with ice sheets receding so or at least before they became as noticeable as they are now. The idea was that you would put these things on the ice, they would melt a hole through and just start boring down into the ice sheet, and then eventually the ice would reform on top of that hole. So you would have a solid barrier of

ice all around this radioactive material. And as we've discussed, water is really good at shielding from radiation. Um. But yeah, international treaties pretty much mean that that is off the table. For one thing, most countries wouldn't have access to this directly. They'd have to treaty with some other country that does have access to it and be able, you know, to to dump their nuclear waste in another country that's not

likely to happen. Countries don't tend to be too hot on the idea of yeah, bring us all the stuff that you're afraid is going to kill you, and will totally hold on to it for you. And even if you found a country neutral place, I mean, is an Antarctica a scientific yeah place? Yeah, we could just scrap

all of the scientific and debtors going on down there. Yea, there's some treaties that prevent us from doing ok yeah, yeah, but the same sort of idea, the idea that you know, we could in theory put it there, except for the fact that most countries have signed treaties saying we totally won't do that because we all agree that that's probably not the best idea, it's not the best use of the area. No, no, just the fact that it's for

public use. That's kind of like saying, because we can't dump trash in our front yard, maybe we should just go dump it in the street. Or really it's in the yards of those other people over there because they moved away, and who knows who cares, Let's just put it all on that vacant lot. Okay, Okay, Well, I think what about a better idea. Now we have talked before.

We won't really focus on it today because we've done a whole podcast on it before, but the idea of like thorium reactors and waste reclaiming nuclear reactors, there are certain proposals for types of nuclear energy that could use up some of this stuff that currently becomes waste, which I think is a brilliant idea if if we can make it practical. Yeah, and as long as you can make it where again you're getting more energy out of the deal than it took to make the deal possible.

Even if that's a long term prospect, then that's that's something we should look into. What about this idea of remediation, Well, remediation is one of those fields that scientists researchers are looking into as a possible way of dealing with nuclear waste, including using stuff like microbes or metal sulfides, transmutation methods, bringing old alchemy into the nuclear age. But the whole idea is just to decrease the radioactivity of nuclear waste.

But the thing is, we don't know if any of those methods are ever going to be scalable, if we'll ever be able to deal with more than just minute traces. It may be that in the lab, sure this method works great for this tiny amount of radioactive material, but if you're talking about the material produced by an entire nuclear plant over the course of a year, there may not be any practical way of using these methods to deal with that amount of waste. And even if it's practical,

it may not in the sense of it works. It may not be practical from an energy or monetary source if it costs more energy for you to do than some other method. Yeah, yeah, okay, So I think what all of this is leading up to is the basic fact that we don't even want this on our planet. This is not There is no good place that is entirely safe for us to put nuclear waste, not that we can access anyway, right right, Well, I guess we could put it into the core, but you can't really

get there. If there was only like a little hatch straight to the core, we had some kind of Jewels Burne style machine for that, then that would be terrific. But why don't we just shoot it into space? Y'all? This is the internet comment or solution. Shot Yeah, blasted it, blow it out the airlock. Same thing for trash, right,

that was the same thing. I was like, why don't we just like get rid of the landfills by attaching it to like a giant net to a rocket just aimed that sucker at the Sun and say, Sionara, Man, yeah, it doesn't make sense to shoot it into space. The answer is no, it does no, no, no, no, no no. Joe pray tell why does it not make sense? Well? I just decided to gather a few basic facts and then do some depressing math, and now we bring you

the popular forward thinking segment depressing math. Okay, so, first of all, space launches are very very expensive, so cost per pound is going to vary with every launch, and so different rockets will have have different expenses. But the older commonly cited figure is that on average, it costs NASA about ten thousand bucks per pound to take cargo from the surface of the Earth to low Earth orbit. Okay, so in the near future that average might change. It's

probably going to be different. We don't know exactly what the number is going to be, so maybe we imagine with the advent of private space launches, it'll get a lot lower. Suffice to say that it's still gonna be really high cost. So take whatever low ball option you want, and let's say, for to have some contrast, maybe they'll cut it in half to five thousand dollars a pound. I think that might be very optimistic, but we don't know.

So the nuclear industry produces about two thousand metric tons of spent nuclear fuel per year, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, and they are a nuclear industry lobbying groups. So I think it's a good idea to suspect that these figures might be conservative. And this is just for the United States, right, Yes, So metric tons is about five million, seventy thousand pounds. Multiply that by ten thousand dollars per pound, and it's fifty point seven billion dollars

a year in launch costs. And that's just launching. That's not counting the transportation of getting the waste to the launch site, or what we do with it once it's in space, or even developing the right kind of capsule to carry the stuff in the first place. Right, right, Right, So if you want to be much more optimistic and assume the launch costs of five thousand dollars per pound, that's still twenty five point or billion dollars. And that's

just the spent nuclear fuel. Okay, well, what about high level waste? And so if you assume there you're talking about a number something like seven thousand metric tons a year, that's about fifteen point four million pounds. So to ship that into space at ten thousand per pound to be a hundred and fifty four billion dollars a year at five thousand and be seventy seven billion dollars every year.

And keep in mind also this is just the new spent nuclear fuel and high level waste that we're producing every year, not counting all the stuff we've already got sitting there. Can we afford not to shoot it into space? I want to say one more thing, hold on, that's also just talking about low Earth orbit. To send something farther away than low Earth orbit, like to say, shoot it into the Sun as some people have imagined, which actually, if you're going to shoot it into space, that's probably

one of the best places to send it. You don't really want to keep it in low Earth orbit with the potential for it to have orbit decay and fall right back to Earth, right, so you want to take it to the Sun, like like Superman did with nuclear weapons in Superman for the Quest for Peace, one of our favorite shows to reference on Fantastic documentary, one of our favorite movies here. Uh, it would cost even more, I mean a lot more. Typically fuel costs to get

it out there. It'll take something to like to geosynchronous orbit, costs a lot more than he wants. You get out of the travitational pull of Earth. You really just need a little thrust and then it'll just it'll just go. You know. Well that way, the costs of rocket launches aren't just in the fuel. I mean, that's a lot of it, but a lot of it's got to be

in in designing this capsule and stuff like that. So the even more important issue is that even if we were to have unlimited money to blast this stuff into space, the bigger concern is what happens if there's a critical launch failure on a vehicle that is carrying high level nuclear waste. Yeah. We The sad fact about the space industry is that it hasn't gone off without a hitch.

There is a long history of failures. Some catastrophe in nature somewhere tragically people lost their lives as a result, and you know, it's it's just a it's a fact that things that we build will not always work exactly as we had intended all the time, right, So it is a very horrible tragedy when there's a launch failure and astronauts lose their lives. It would be so much worse even to not only have astronauts lose their lives, but to have high level nuclear waste raining down over

the surface of the Earth from the atmosphere. I mean, that's that that's just horrible scenario. Well, I mean, we talked about the not in my backyard problem with the the geological repositories. Can you imagine the reaction of people who live near launch sites if it were made public that we are going to attempt to launch nuclear waste into space. This place where tragedy has struck before, could potentially become ground zero for high level waste raining down here.

And even if you could, you know, material science your way into a container that would absolutely be full proof against that kind of thing. That's a container that you're talking about shooting into the sun. And I'm sure it's not inexpensive to crank out. Yeah, it's not feasible for multiple reasons. It's it would be incredibly expensive, The risk would be astronomical, not to make too big of a space pun on it. Uh, and so it just it does not make sense if we had a magical teleport device, sure,

but we don't have one of those. So we have to we have to deal with the problem here on Earth. So I guess that's not to say that at no point in the future of humanity will it ever be feasible, but you just have to. It would take a lot to get there. It have to be much more economically feasible to take stuff to orbit. You'd have to have a very very safe way of transporting cargo from the surface to orbit, and right now we have nothing like that.

All that being said, the United States did actually look into this as a potential way, not necessarily, you know, throwing all their chips into it. They're just like, well, does this make sense? Had somebody write up a report? I guess yeah. There probably was just a big response to just said nope. So they didn't go with the idea. No, they did not. As a quick fix, something a little bit more down to earth has been proposed, And sorry,

I'm sorry I couldn't be great ahead. Some people are proposing two and fifty years sites for storing this kind of waste. Yeah, I think that's a much better idea. Yeah. Well, and you know, and in response, some people have said, well, what about the real sites like yuck A Mountain And I mean, okay, look, you guys, currently the uck A Mountain project dot gov website is a time stamp. Yeah,

it literally just gives you the time stamps. Nothing. They're not even a few under construction gifts, right, don't even have a looping midi of something playing in the background. I think we should write them and to their non existing email address and let them know about this. But the problems with these two hundred and fifty year sites are that, I mean, basically, they're only good for two

fifty years. That's not actually that's really only delaying the problem for a very short period of time globally speaking. And you're still incurring the expense of building these sites and transporting all of this waste over to them, which, as we mentioned before, is not really easy or simple. Um. I mean, we do already do quite a bit of it.

According to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we already have some three million packages of radioactive materials being shipped by highway, rail, air, and water around the United States every year, which is

a lot. It seems like a whole bunch to me, especially considering that it's such an expensive sounding process that involves all of this shipping materials, testing, like every single container that is used has to be exposed to really stringent testing, and um furthermore, a lot of interdepartmental handshakes and paperwork, and furthermore, like armed escorts in the case have spent fuel going through populated areas. All all kinds

of considerations are taken. Now, I will say that I've seen some people propose that we go with the two fifty year route, working toward making facilities that would be strong enough to go much longer than that, Like I like a rent to own option. Yeah, The idea being that it's a lot easier to sell the idea of two d fifty years because you actually have to build in stuff like budget, right, you have to budget for a facility that can be with can withstand this for

two hud fifty years. If you design something that can actually last ten thousand years, but you sell it as two d fifty years, then suddenly you have something that's easier to work around when you're talking about numbers and spreadsheets and budgets. I know that sounds crazy, It sounds insane that it all comes down to moving some figures around on a spreadsheet to make sure that you can pay for the thing that you need. But ultimately, that's

the reality we live in. So it is possible that just by reframing a repository as saying this is a two and fifty year solution rather than a ten thousand year solution, you make get a more likely reality. That's something someone will be all right, well, I can I can wrap my head around that. When you give me a number like ten thousand years, it's so long that I just my reaction is just immediately to go on

the defensive two or fifty years. Although it's well beyond the expected lifespan of anyone living today, barring any miraculous discoveries in one form or another, I mean, singularity all aside, then it's something that's a little bit easier for us to comprehend. It's well, yeah, ten thousand years, you're talking about, that's that's going into prehistoric time. If we ten thousand years back. That's like the beginning of agriculture, basically the

two d fifty years. Then you're like, oh, okay, I know in general what people were like two fifty years ago. Years in the future, is it's going to be like floating skateboards. Yeah, yeah, actually that's next year. They won't technically be skate boards, will they know? They'll be hoverboards? Right yeah, coming to your fact straight, Lauren, I mean the next year. I think October next year actually, according to Back to the Future too. Oh nice, we'll have

to look out for those, okay, okay. So I want to move the discussion onto one last consideration, which which I think is actually one of the most interesting questions. Um, let's say that we don't have a solution that's one of these sort of reprocessing or remediation solutions. One of the things that that takes the waste out of the picture. Assuming we have waste that's gonna be here to stay, how do we talk to the future to keep it safe? Right, So we'll say that, Um, I think would y'all agree

that for now it seems like the standard answer. The deep geological repositories probably are the best solution currently more than all these alternatives, I think, out of all the ones that have been proposed, they are they make the most sense. Okay, yeah, I would probably agree. So imagine

you've got a facility that's a deep geological repository. It's a place where deep under the ground there is a bunch of buried, very dangerous waste, and it's going to be dangerous, long long, long after year gone ten thousand years in the future, maybe even a hundred thousand years in the future. How do you communicate that fact to the future. Actually, uh so, one of my favorite other podcasts did a great episode about this. It's a podcast called Invisible and so if you're a fan of our show,

you should also check them out. Um they did in an episode I think it was called ten thousand Years, and they look into exactly this problem in the episode, and I just really liked it a lot. I like them so much. I really think, all you should go check it out. So I wanted to give them a

shout out. And they focused on the idea that at the place we talked about earlier, the waste isolation pilot plant, the whip facility, there was a project to study exactly this problem of how to communicate the danger of a nuclear waste storage facility two people far far in the future, when you can't anticipate what sort of language they will

be using, how they'll be communicating. How do how do you communicate something when you have no clue what the those people are going to use as a basis for communication. I mean, if you're talking to people ten thousand years in the future, you're basically talking to aliens. I mean they there is no guarantee they'll speak any language that's on Earth today. There's no guarantee that they will share our cultural knowledge, so they might not even understand the

same symbols we have to. I like the part, and this was in the podcast. You definitely should listen to that that episode because it was very informative and entertaining. I like the part where they talked about how people gravitate towards the skull and crossbones as a warning, saying, you know, that's like poison, danger, pirates, etcetera, things that you don't necessarily want to encounter. Keep in mind, folks,

not all pirates, like Johnny Depp. In fact, I think none of them did um So you know, It's one of those one of those things where said, well this is this is clearly going to be that kind of warning, except that if you look around today, you see lots of skull and crossbones on stuff like kissing boards. Yeah, my wife has a sweater with one that has a little pink bow on it. Um. You know. It's these

are things that we have perhaps diluted its meaning. So in other words, we cannot count on a culture thinking of skull and crossbones is any kind of warning they might think, Oh wow, this is where the hot topics started. One thing I thought about is that the nuclear symbol, we expect that should continue to have meaning for all ages. Now, how many novelty items have you seen with the nuclear symbol on them? Again? Yeah, we have perhaps diluted that

that so yeah, so uh. In this other podcast they talk a lot about the the signs and the symbols and how to communicate that in sort of these visual warnings. But I wanted to focus on something else, something else the Whip Project studied, which was trying to create landscapes that would themselves discourage people from coming near them. So sort of this landscape engineering what I would call stay

away scapes. Right. Um, that seemed like a really interesting idea to me because that might rely less on people being able to understand the messages you're sending through text or through pictures. So you're purposefully making the landscape foreboding and and uh, trying to communicate the idea of this a bad place without knowing what the cultural ideas of good and bad are going to be in ten thousand years. Just try and make it so that any reasonable person

would look at that and say, yeah, not going there. Yeah, so let's let's just put ourselves in the space and try to imagine what you would have to do. So you've got an area of land, and you need to put things there, and and they're gonna have to have a lot of qualities. Like one of the qualities those items you put in the place need to have is that they make the message clear, like they say stay

away very clearly. They have to be able to last as long as the facility is gonna lie exactly, and if that's going to be ten thousand years or even a hundred thousand years, I mean, what on earth? It's like impossibly sturdy material, right, they have to be something that's not going to be blown away by the wind. Or so let's just look around and all the stuff humans have built that have lasted for ten thousand, you know,

I mean not much. Maybe some ancient megalithic st uture is at Malta, I guess, I mean not ten thousand. But now when you're going ten thousand, you're kind of looking at caves. It has to be able to, uh, to withstand the natural kind of removal and recycling process of the earth erosion and stuff. So a lot of the ideas that have been floated you might understand why

their ideas for like gigantic stone monuments and stuff like that. Yeah, I can't think of ever a time in my life where I saw some sort of gigantic structure and thought, oh gosh, I totally don't want to get closer and see what the heck that thing is. That's exactly the next problem. You have to actually make sure that this thing is not attractive. So, like one of the ideas they mentioned is this landscape of thorns. Did y'all see

the pictures on the whip site. Yeah, the pictures just made me think there's no way I would not want to go there. The idea behind it. So it was designed by one of the people this project contacted. They had this idea that you should have these scary looking spikes jutting up out of the earth to to communicate a sense of danger and foreboding, to make it look like a really scary place, you know, the the Valley

of Thorns in a Disney movie. It looked to me like the landscape you would see in a Tim Burton film before he took a heat lamp to it and it formed all the little curly cueues. Yea, so pretty much. Well, anyway, what it looked to me was like something that would make me think, Man, I gotta go check that out. It's like a playground. I want to go to there. Exactly. It's when you make things that are intentionally designed to

look scary, they actually end up looking too interesting. Quality to that, Yeah, you'd have to figure out some way of making it less interesting. So maybe you make the most boring place, right, No one would want to go there as Also, what are these design elements created from, because there's the potential of people going like, this looks

like a terrific recycling field exactly. That's exactly right. So you want to you don't want to make them out of anything that can be repurpose because people might show up in ten thousand years whatever and say, hey, you know that's a bunch of steel. I can make buildings out of steel. Let me get some of this and might as well build a building next to this place. So this creates a really difficult problem. How how do

you achieve all of these different ideas? I mean, one idea I thought about was instead of having any kind of like spikes or interesting jutting features, would be to kind of try to create the most unfriendly but uninteresting landscape possible. So maybe just this landscape of really unclimbable rock rubble. Does that make any sense? Sure? I suppose so I was, I mean, with it with a barrier around it. I think it's really the barrier around it.

If you have a whole lot of I mean at a safe distance, a whole lot of big blocks that have you know, human faces contorted in horror. But yet again, I would think that was interesting. And one thing you might notice is, uh so lots of ancient tombs and stuff like that are covered in warnings. You know, they have things on them that look like don't come in here because you will be tortured by evil spirits if you do. And what do people do? They go right

on it, and that looks so cool. There's response to that is law's ancient Egypt. After after a few people go in to your nuclear waste site that has been warning that there are evil spirits here, they get sick and die, and then you get the growing folklore that indeed, evil spirits live there and we need to stay away.

Well not, I mean, again, using ancient Egypt as a as an example, there are still to this day rumors that going into these ancient tombs of great warning, you know, there are still rumors that that will let evil spirits upon you. And then people have died. In my case, there'll there'll be a pile bodies. So but no, but you forget several things. I mean, number one, yeah, don't people still think Howard Carter was killed by the Mummy's curse? Uh?

And then number two, the effects of radiation might be very slow acting. You might have people establish a community before they start getting all these problems, but the community dies out, and again you're just trying to emphasize your cruelty. I'm just saying, I'm just saying that if if one small portion of humanity in ten thousand years has to die, so that the rest of humanity is aware that there, in fact is a terrible, terrible thing here that will

cause harm due to the stupid decisions of of their ancestors. Okay, rather than how do we figure out a warning that will actually apply to them? I mean, ultimately it's going to be we don't have any way of knowing, right, there's no way for us to know buying buying the invention of a time machine. We cannot tell so ultimately, and also it's not really going to matter to any of us eventually, I mean not directly, it really isn't we have I think you're a terrible person, John, I'm

not saying. I'm not saying we don't have a responsibility for future generations. We certainly do. I believe. However, not only are we not going to know about it, it's not going to matter to us by the time it actually ends up being a problem for them. But perhaps

we should. We should task um, some someone I don't know, family or organization or whatever it is, to every year ago and an update in whatever the language is, or every decade or something like that, go up and update the stones and and be like inherited position to be the keeper of the stones and be like no for serious,

We're like like, we'll kill you. Yeah, that's actually something like that is sort of part of the proposal they ended up with is the signs include requests for people in the future who come across the signs to make new copies of the signs that will withstand the elements. I think what they're saying like, if this is hard to read, please make a new copy. They just need to set up a speaker and a looping MP three of Slim Whitman's singing and that'll be enough. People just

like I do not want to be here. And then they they yet another. So here's another idea I thought of. It's that better than my idea. It might be a little bit better than your ideas. I wondered if you could take advantage of natural landscapes on the Earth. For example, there are places on the planet Earth that you absolutely do not want to go, and they're bad in really uninteresting ways, like just the center of a desert where there's nothing there and nothing grows and no one settles,

and it's just an utter waste land. I wonder if the best solution would be to do that now the I thought that for a moment, and then I thought to myself, We'll wait a minute, though. How long does it take a climb it to change? How can you predict what that landscape is going to look like in ten What if it's fertile land in a few thousand years?

You know, I mean that's a long time. It's it's a long enough time for things to especially considering the rate of change right that it's hard to predict what is going to be an arid landscape, uh, ten thous years from now. I mean, it's tricky. So, as it turns out, this is a hard problem, and it's it's this is one of the reasons why it's taken us

so long. Why why we've been running out the clock on the length of time the above ground facilities have been holding on to high level waste while we try to come up with a working, working solution for the permanent place of that stuff. Yeah, maybe what we really do need to do is start up it, start out some of these like two fifty year kind of facilities and sort of leave a memo to the future and be like, hey, we tried, yeah, and meanwhile we're still

making this stuff. Sorry. This also is one of the reasons why I really hope that fusion ends up working out somewhere down the line, because it would produce far fewer dangerous byproducts than the fiscile version of nuclear power, or that any of the technologies to reclaim and repurpose some of the spent nuclear fuel. Yeah. Yeah, if it becomes a scalable, financially feasible method, than yes, that would also be a great benefit to humanity. Again, I think

nuclear power the principles are are sound. It's just that the reality of what do you do with this nuclear waste is a real problem that we have to figure out how to solve. Um. Barring anyone finding that magic hatch to the core of the Earth, it's going to be one that's going to require some pretty difficult decisions. So it'll be something that I expect we'll see more about the within our lifetimes. Yeah. Well, I mean, in the meantime, get those geological facilities going. Yeah, if you can.

I mean, there's a lot of political pressure to not do that thing in any given place, but if it's at all. You know, if it's one of those things that can be done, it should be done because it does look like it's the best option out of all the ones that have been explored so far. So unless someone's come up with something brand new tomorrow, which would be wonderful. Um, I totally agree. If we can get some movement on the geological repository front, that would be awesome.

All right, Well, that wraps up this discussion about you know, what do we do about this problem with nuclear waste? And obviously you know the the answers are tough, but they are ones that we need to tackle. So again, we need to concentrate on these problems. Otherwise there there's not a solution that's going to come up magically. We've

got to act on this sort of thing. Uh. Anyway, if you guys have suggestions for future episodes of forward Thinking, you've got any ideas for something you definitely want to year in the future, let us know on Twitter, on Facebook, or on Google Plus. Our handle at all three is f w Thinking and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places