The Problem With Nuclear Waste

old friend Cole, Yeah, we have. We've talked about fusion as a potential future energy source, should we ever really solve that problem there there are some promising scientific experiments that could lead to fusion one day being a real contender, but for now it's still very much in that sort of theoretical and and and experimental stage. But Jonathan, what's the opposite of fusion? Well, let's see, there's you mean, like jazz fusion. I'd say punk really is kind of

the opposite of fusion. I don't know about that. The opposite of fusion is probably like country western music. That's that's a fusion of country and western Okay, guys, I think we're getting off topic. I think I think, well, I think what you what you meant was vision, right, vision, So it's a fusing, fusing two things to become a new one thing. You're taking one thing and splitting it up into two things. Although I think that that another

episode in the future about the future of musical fusion. Yeah, then have our discussion about jazz fusion and country Western music. No, today, we're going to talk about vision. Nuclear fission, the standard, regular old vision, which is great because we already know how to do it. It works today. Yeah, in fact, we don't even have to be around for it to happen. But all so, why are we talking about it if

it already works today? Specifically, because while nuclear power is certainly something we can tap into, it comes with a pretty big drawback. Yeah. So nuclear power has no direct carbon emissions, it's very productive, it's very powerful, and it's ready to go today. These are all really really great things about nuclear power. So really, why would anybody be opposed to nuclear power? There's essentially one main reason. Yeah, the stuff that's left over after you have created your

nuclear reactions to heat up water to turn turbines. Because Remember, ultimately, that's what we're talking about, is that the nuclear power is just used to generate it of generating heat, generate turbine spinning. Yeah, you're just making steam, is all you're really doing the same sort of thing is with steam engines. Is just now you're you've souped it up. Well. Yeah, And the problem here actually isn't always just what's left behind,

but the fuel in general. It's people tend to have a problem with because, as it turns out, radioactive stuff, in addition to creating a lot of steam very efficiently, is not safe. Yeah, it's not good, not good for things? What are living? Juggle it? No, do not play with a super happy fun ball. No, do not do not look No. So this is the problem we're going to talk about today. Actually over the next two podcasts. This

is going to be a two parter. Today is part one where we're going to talk about what's the problem with nuclear waste because it is very much a future problem, and then on the next podcast we're going to talk about proposed solutions what what are you going to do about it? Today, we decided to just devote this to talking about what the problem is and sort of looking at what it means for us. So what is radioactive waste and how is it produced? And are are there

different kinds of radioactive waste? They are absolutely different kinds of radioactive waste. So now we're talking about radioactive stuff. This is stuff that specifically ionizing creation, stuff that is uh, potentially harmful because it can cause electrons to fly off of ados and eventually cause things like mutations and other issues.

Will go into more about that in a little bit, but specifically, the type that most people are absolutely terrified of is called high level waste, which can sometimes also include spent nuclear fuel, although generally speaking they people tend to separate the two as two separate things. But they both are extremely dangerous, all right. The spent fuel is possibly even more dangerous, but yeah, it's it's but neither of them, again are things you want to juggle, right, So,

spent nuclear fuel is exactly what it sounds like. It's it's when you have used these nuclear rods or you know, whatever format the nuclear fuel has come into, Uh, it has lost enough of its reactive nature, so there's no longer as efficiently heating up water to super high temperatures. So you need to replace it with new fuel. Uh,

that's spent nuclear fuel is pretty dangerous. Now, some countries will end up trying to reprocess that spent nuclear fuel to recapture some of the uranium and plutonium that's in it, because, as it turns out, there's quite a bit of unused or unburnt fuel in those fuel rods. Uh. We're talking around of the fuel being unused. So the processing, the reprocessing of this ends up creating a mixture of uranium

and plutonium. And then you have this leftover stuff. About three percent of it is completely left over that you can't do anything with. It's called high level waste. Uh. And while it only makes up three percent of of the actual volume of stuff, it makes up of the radioactivity of the nuclear waste that we generally talk about, like what are we going to do with this stuff? So this is the really super dangerous stuff. So what are the attributes of this this high level ways store

spent nuclear fuel? If you're going to group them together, or we'll just today group them together because they're both there's the same sort of problem. Uh. They're both very radioactive and very hot, and we produce a kind of significant amount of it when you combine all of our nuclear facilities together, right especially we're mainly going to be talking about the United States in these podcasts, but keep in mind that, of course, the United States is not

the only country using nuclear power. There are a lot of countries that do. And all of the countries have to consider what are they going to do with this nuclear waste once once it starts to accumulate, what do you do with it? Now? For the most part, the first thing we do is we end up using water to help shield, well, one to cool it and two to shield us from the radioactivity water. As it turns out, it's a really good shield if you have a lot

of it. So it turns out that removing high level waste from uh spent nuclear fuel usually you have to do it underwater, and then you store it in a pool of water. And you're talking about for spent nuclear fuel, you would want to store it in water for about fifty years before you do anything else with it. Yeah. The high level waste can be stored for as little as only five yeah, and then put into dry cask containers.

Usually the pools of water also contain some kind of shielding material like boron that will help help absorb any free right, any any free particles that are emitted through this, because keep in mind the nuclear reactions we're talking about the reason why this is a good fuel source is the fact that once you start a reaction, it helps sustain itself, right. It gives off the particles that continue to allow the unspent fuel to then react. It becomes

a chain reaction. And in fact, if you do not control this chain reaction, that's when you go into something like a nuclear meltdown, which we have all pretty much agreed is what we would call a bad thing. Yes, so I'm good, um, but yeah, So after five years, you can take the high level wastes and store them in these dry ventilated steel containers that are filled with inert gases something like helium um and then you can place those in concrete containers. That's called your your dry containment.

And uh, Ultimately, the idea that that most people came into agreement on several decades ago was that you would move the stuff to a geological repository, which essentially means a really deep hole in the ground where it would be safe from everything else. But we'll have more to say about that a little bit later, and just for the record, as of two thousand nine, each one of these dry casks cost about a million bucks to create. Yeah,

so that's that's your high level waste. That's that's just one of several types of waste that we haven't even covered the other types yet we're about too. So keep in mind that that high level waste, that's the main thing people are worried about it. It is very radioactive, very dangerous. You don't want to get near it. But it's only about three percent of the volume of the total waste we create. So there's a there's a much larger group of things we create that are somewhat radioactive,

the lower level waste. You've got intermediate level waste and low level waste. And this comes from the fact that radioactivity, uh you might say is sort of like cooties on the playground Dead. You certainly have said that, because it says it in the notes. So you take a very radioactive object like some plutonium core, okay, and then you expose that to a second object to just imagine it is,

I don't know, a T shirt, okay. So that second object can then actually become dangerous in itself, even after you've removed it from the plutonium core. Why is that, Well, there are a couple of reasons. I think the main one is that tiny radioactive particles or radioactive dust can

attach itself to this second object. So then, yeah, you might have particles that are so small you can't see them, but these particles are radioactive and they're still capable of shooting out these uh, these tiny you know, ionizing radiations

that can do major damage to you. The other thing is that some types of objects, when they're bombarded with radioactivity, can become radioactive themselves, Like so some of the atoms within them will change to radioactive isotopes that can then turn around and start giving off their own radiation, and that's bad news. Also, though I think that's less often a concern than the previous The main one you're talking

about is these radioactive particles that dust. So these secondary objects like this make up these lower level waste, this intermediate waste, low level wasts that represent the majority of what's produced by nuclear power generation. And these waste products can include all kinds of stuff, from like old parts of the reactor or of the cooling assembly, to tools or protective clothes and shieldings, masks, gloves, all kinds of

stuff that's been around other things that are radioactive. Yeah, general rule of thumb is the longer it's been in contact with the radioactive source, the more likely it's going to be an intermediary level waste rather than a low level waist. Whereas things that have had limited contact tend to fall into the low level waist. That's just a

general rule of thumb. It doesn't necessarily apply in every case, but something like say a filter would be intermediary because it had more consistent contact with the source of radiation, whereas a suit that was worn by someone who had to do some maintenance within an area that had some radioactivity might be considered low level because while it had exposure, it was it was only on one occasion and it was limited. But you still have to classify its waste.

That needs to be dealt with in a particular way, right because at a certain point, if you expose that T shirt to another T shirt, you've got another radioactive T shirt and then and eventually that's going to get exposed to somebody. Radioactive T shirts all the way down, probably through a T shirt cannon of some sort. Yeah, it's it's oh no, yeah, bring bring some pre show discussion into the show. That's what I'm doing right now, folks. Um.

But that's actually not all, folks. There are other kinds of radioactive byproducts of this entire nuclear energy equation. You've also got basic stuff that was created when the raw nuclear materials were taken out of the ground. For example, uranium mill tailings, which is a sand like byproduct of mining uranium. It can contain flex of radium, uranium, thorium, and lots of other hazardous stuff and UH and and like all of this other waste, it can contaminate the

local air, water, or nearby objects. It produces gamma radiation, and you know, generally it really does take some care and concern to be disposed of properly. But we'll talk more about that disposal process a little bit later, right. And one other type I want to mention, which is really only recognized by the United States is transuranic or transuranic waste, which is essentially waste that involves UH elements

with atomic numbers higher than uranium. It's usually produced as a byproduct of UH nuclear weapons research or laboratory research. It can also come from nuclear power. We're talking mostly about man made elements at this point, but that's another type of nuclear waste that doesn't easily fall into these other categories. Seems like the right. Certainly, if there's some

plutonium in it, isn't it technically transuranic? Uh? It's. It certainly can overlap it's And again it's one of those designations that we find in the United States but not in other countries. It's going to come into play when we talk about geologic reposite tories and whether or not we have any working ones currently. Yeah. Okay, so we've separated the nuclear waste down into these categories, but we should probably talk about how dangerous is it. Should we

be worried? Well, all right, should we be worried in general? I mean, you don't need to lose sleep tonight day to day, You're all right, But let me try to approach that again. Um, let's say you walk into a room with some high level waste in it and you just stand there for ten minutes. Should you be worried? Yes? You should. You should. First of all, you should be worried about anyone who told you that was a good

idea because that person does not like you. Um. The in fact, the the whole concept of the danger of radiation uh involves the level of radioactive material, the amount of time that you have spent an exposed to said material, and the distance between you and said material. Before we get into that, let's just let's just talk about plutonium, all right, Just using plutonium as an example, now, uh, there is uh, there are a lot of people who say that plutonium is the most toxic substance on Earth.

I kind of maybe take issue with that because there are a lot of different ways you can measure toxicity and plutonium. I mean, there are different isotopes of plutonium. Someone much more dangerous. If someone were to give you a big old bowl of plutonium dust and say and a spoon, and say, do you want to ingust this or do you want to say that it's the most toxic stuff in the universe? I think you go with

the second one. Well, what if somebody gave you a big bowl of plutonium dust and also gave you a big bowl of bochi linum toxin and and said what that you have to eat? Yeah, whichever is the least toxic. I mean, I guess it depends on whether or not there any marshmallows in either of them. At that point, that's usually how I make my decision on all serial based products. Okay, no, I'm sorry, my I should take my piddling objection aside. In any case, whatever it is,

you don't want to mess around with plutonium. Breathe in plutonium dust significantly increases your chances of developing lung cancer later. Now, when I say significantly increases your chances, keep in mind that does not mean you will definitely develop lung cancer. It also doesn't mean that if you do develop lung cancer that was specifically because you breathed in plutonium particles.

There may be other contributing factors that lead to that, including inherited ones, whether or not you're a smoker, other issues like that. So the point being, the statistics are tricky things, and you have to keep that in mind whenever you're talking about any statistical increase. But it does mean that you are really bringing putting yourself in severe danger by being in contact with that stuff is not

good for you. UM and uh yeah. Part of the problem there is how long how long these things last in the environment. UM. For example, plutonium two thirty nine. Half of any given bit of the stuff that we handle today will still be harmful in two thousand years. Yeah, so you know, obviously much worse than something like secondhand smoke. You know, this is something that is persistent and unless you have a way of containing it well away from humans,

it's going to potentially cause some really big problems. Right, So you don't have to worry just about not being in the same room with it yourself. You have to worry about a thousand generations down the road not being in the same room. Yeah. Then there's radiation sickness, which not a fun thing to talk about. But the severity of radiation sickness depends upon how much radiation you have absorbed, and it's not common, but it is serious and often

fatal depending upon the exposure. So in your example of walking unprotected into a room filled with high level waste, that exposure would be pretty severe specifically, and getting more severe every moment you spend in contact with that stuff. So the determining factors are, like I said, the strength of the radiated energy, which is quite high with high level waste. How much does since was between you and

the radiation source. Some parts of our body are more sensitive to radiation than other parts of our body, like the gastro intestinal tract is really sensitive as his bone marrow. Early symptoms are really unpleasant. They include nausea and vomiting. Those symptoms will set up pretty much in a correlation with how much exposure you had, So the more exposure you had, the earlier the symptoms will show up. Um. If it was a really severe case, then you might

be very sick within within an hour or two. At most other cases where you might have had exposure but it wasn't as severe, it may take a couple of days before any symptoms show up. Um. We measure these radiation dosages in a couple of different ways. There are units that we call grays. Uh. An X ray tends to be less than point one grays. It's also generally focused on a small area of the body and X ray is so it ends up being less of a of a threat than say an all body exposure of

some powerful radioactive sources. So I give you that fancy lead bib. Yeah, So again it really limits the area that is exposed to this sort of thing. Um, and then your symptoms of radiation sickness will usually appear only after the entire body has absorbed one gray or more of radio radioactivity. Doses greater than six gray are usually not treatable and typically lead to death within two weeks. Now, there's also another unit called the sivert, which you may

have heard of. Now. This is a unit of dose equivalent which is used to relate the different effects from various radiation types on the human body. So it accounts for a quality factor, which is the type of radiation, and a weighting factor, which was the type of tissue affected. It's a little more specific than grays. In other words, you should be getting the sense that not all radioactivity is the same and not all radioactivity exposure will have

the same effect on your body right there. So it's kind of hard to predict in certain cases what exactly is going to have happened to you. But with this high level waste, we know it is very dangerous. This is this is also why it's important to know the difference between ionizing radiation and non ionizing radiation. So high level waste, we're talking ionizing radiation. This is dangerous stuff, But there's other types of radiation that is non ionizing

for example, radio waves. So radio waves like the kind that come from a cell phone tower are not ionizing radiation. It's a they both radiate energy, but they are two different types of radiation and should not be confused. All right, So we've established there are different types of radiation. That we have established are different types of radioactive waste, all of which we need to figure out what to do with them. So what do we do with them? What?

What typically is done with the stuff? Well, fortunately we don't have to worry all that much when we we still do have to be careful, we don't have to worry all that much about the lower level wastes. Yes, they're not intensely dangerous. You can typically just sort of bury them in a what's called a civil nuclear waste facility. Yeah, it's not that much different from say dump. Yeah, it's

it's a pit or a trench. Basically it's covered with soil most of the time, so you you know, as long as I mean, you might put a sign up that's like, hey, don't eat the soil, right right, Yeah, it's it's generally considered to be safe within the realm of of safety. It's it's in there so it also I think typically what's considered lower level waste also has a shorter lifespan, right that it doesn't remain dangerous as long.

And also, while while it's very common for us to see these in these these pits are trenches, particularly in the United States, some other countries actually put low level waste in depositories. So Finland and Sweden both have depositories where they put low level and intermediate level waste UM, which is that's going an extra mile for safety, or at least an extra several um mill might be generous, but it's uh, you know, it's it's going a step further closer to what has been proposed for a high

level waste, but it's UM. It's interesting to me that there are countries that are taking that extra step instead of UH and stuff simply burying it, which from what we can tell, seems to be adequate. Going up a little bit from that, you've got the disposal of byproducts like tailings, which is somewhere in between this low level and what we're going to talk about in a moment,

which is the high level UM now. Now tailings here in the United States of the uranium milling sites here are inactive and are currently the responsibility of the Department of Energy. Um so they are the ones that are taking all of these steps for us, rather than the private nuclear companies that may have opened the mind to begin with. So they set up these sites that use clay and rock to prevent seepage, and uh, you know, put up signs and fences and legal land use restrictions.

There's an actual ep A web page that recommends that, you know, really you should not misused tailings for construction material or backfill around buildings. Well, that's that's a good note. Yeah. Um so so people aren't. People aren't highly concerned about them, is is all I'm saying. You know, like you can you can go a few steps below what we're about to talk about, which is that high level waste. Right, So,

the high level waste. We don't want to be too much of a downer because there are certainly ways that people have talked about dealing with this. What are those ways? Well, you know, we talked about how when low level waste the solution was to bury it. Yeah, right, turn that

up to eleven. And that's kind of the the most agreed upon method for long term solution to high level waste problems, And the reason why you need a long term solution is that twenty four thousand years or so that that's plutonium, and there's there are other ones that have that that could be potentially dangerous for like a hundred thousand years. That's a long time, right, and it's difficult to build something out, especially, I mean right now, most high level waste is stored I think we already

mentioned on site at nuclear facilities around any given country. Yes, so if you have a nuclear plant that is an operation somewhere in that general area, is also their containment site for all the high level waste and spent nuclear fuel that they're now that they're not trying to to you know, repurpose in any way, right, But it would be highly impractical to build at each of these nuclear sites something so deep going and expensive that you would

be able to more permanently house this dangerous materials. So overall, it is agreed upon that the best way to go about storing nuclear the high level nuclear stuff would be a centralized geological repository. And part of that is because one identifying such a site, it takes time and effort figuring out what sites are going to meet the requirements so that you know, in a hundred thousand years time it will still in theory be perfectly safe, or at

least be safely containing the high level waste. Secondly, you have to figure out that it's much better to have a centralized location, especially for something that could be attempting target, for an organization that wants to get his hands on nuclear material, it would be better to have that all in a place where you could have the most maximum security possible in that one location, as opposed to a bunch of tempting targets that are all spread out all

over the place where some of them may be more susceptible than others. This is a terrifying idea, but it's one that has to be taken into consideration. It's one of the things that factored into the idea of having the centralized geological repositories. So it would need to be buried really deep underground. We're talking several hundred meters several like a thousand feet or so maybe around that area.

Some of them are deeper. Some of them are a little less deep than that, but that's generally speaking what we're looking at. Uh, it needs to have a lot of reinforcement. We're talking about some shielding like steel and concrete, maybe water even although that's very dangerous. You don't want you don't want this leaking into the groundwater, right, You

don't want to contaminate any groundwater whatsoever. You don't want to irradiate the groundwater because that could then affect all sorts of life forms, right whether today or down the road. So you want to try and make sure that it's airtight, water tight. You don't want any radioactive dust to get out of it, you don't want any water to get into it. You want to make sure that it's really secure from all sorts of of intrusions, whether human or otherwise.

And then there's there's the social factor, the social problem, the political problem of geological repositories. So you have all these considerations you have to make in order to even find a site that's going to look useful. Then you have to convince people that this is a good idea and it should be put there, which is very hard to do for the people who live in the general vicinity of said proposed site. Oh yeah, it's it's hard to even convince people to let you build a nuclear

facility period in their generalized neighborhood. And that's like like you're going to get cheaper energy that will be awesome for you. And this is just like your fish could have three eyes. Yeah, it's it's I mean, it's it's an understandable fear in the sense that radiation is scary. Right. We cannot see it, but we know it affects us. You know, we cannot we cannot actually see little wavy lines coming out of this stuff that looks just like rocks to us, you know, or or just a canister

of something or a big concrete container. We can't see anything from it, and yet it can kill us. So and it's it's really scientifically complicated. I mean, it kind of goes along the lines of stuff that we don't understand and is a lot scarier to us. And I think that people, you know, see things in pop culture about Godzilla, Mary Curry or you know, whatever it is, and get extra freaked out. I mean, not that it's not something that deserves to be freaked out about. I

think we had a big turnaround in our reaction. Like if you look at those early nineteen forties, things like the Miracle radiation and how it's gonna make you, well the better place. And then I feel like it's earlier in the forties with the I mean, when when were people drinking radium water? I don't know about that, but radiation was really that that became a popular thing in the forties. I'm googling. But by the by the fifties

you get into the duck and cover stage. Hold on, Let's see, in the early nineteen hundreds, radioactive water was quite the rave. Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure you got glowing reviews. Oh no, or are like painting the insides of your watch with radium something? They would glow, et cetera. Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of things where there was a sort of this sort of craze about the stuff until we start to more understand the potential hazards.

So at any rate, it suffers from the not in my backyard problem also known as nimby, where people who people may even say, I completely agree that we need this, but I don't agree that we need it in my backyard. Yeah, some somebody else do it. Yeah, Okay, so we all think pretty much agree nuclear power great, you know, at least potentially yeah, at the same time has this really really serious problem. So we let's just do something about it.

Let's let's build all of the geological repositories we can. How many do we already have for high level waste? Zero? Yeah? Zero? That, by the way, that's that's around the world, that's not just the United States. So we got to start with the proposed geological geological repository for high level waste. There's one, Yeah, the Yucka Mountain in Nevada. That was the big one. And I say was because it's still kind of in limbo right now. We'll get into that in a moment.

The mountains not in limbo. Mountains still in Nevada, but the proposed process of actually trying it into a repository limbo city could be like Welcome to night Vale, like a little bit in limbo. It might be right, So, um there, I do not know if there's an essentient glow cloud over yuck A Mountain wouldn't surprise me at this point. But it's been the intended repository for the

US since the nineties. And the thing is that Nevada state representatives have really resisted this because the citizens of Nevada really don't like the idea of a giant nuclear waste dump in their state, no matter how you how you define it, whether you say, look, this is a facility that's meant to safely have all this, all the geological features are ideal for this kind of thing. It's a different story when you live a hundred and twenty

kilometers away. You know, Las Vegas is like within that distance. And at the time when it was proposed, Las Vegas was a smaller city than it is today. But now it's it's relatively large. So you've got a very powerful political resistance to putting it there. Um So meanwhile, to make matters more complicated, might as well say this, now you've got an equally powerful political uh push for it

to be established there. Because you've got all these other nuclear power plants right across the United States, each of which has to have a containment facility for those high level wastes and spent nuclear fuel. They don't want to keep that indefinitely. They're not supposed to keep it indefinitely. That stuff is meant to go to a geological repository. So they put political pressure for yucka Mountain to become

one of these things. So you've got the state of Nevada resisting, You've got other states with existing nuclear facilities saying no, we have to do this. That's what we agreed upon. That was the agreement. Let's do it, um And it's a big political nightmare, uh, for for very reasons. Like we said, I mean, people are afraid of the

stuff because it's scary. So even if yuck a Mountain got total clearance for licensing of becoming a geological repository, we would not be using it until at the earliest. And I don't think it's going to happen at all. I don't think we're going to see it ever be used as a repository. But okay, I looked into the full back story of the Yuka Mountain thing because it's such a interesting idea, and I think it's a pretty

good idea. But I don't live in Las Vegas, so I mean, you know, it's it's a lot easier for us to say it because we live from in Georgia, a couple thousand miles away. Makes it a lot easier. But okay, So way back in three a bunch of private nuclear energy companies started working together to help create

one of these permanent centralized disposal sites UM. And meanwhile, on the political side, Congress approved research into placing a facility at Yucca Mountain among nine total potential sites in seven That whole thing kicked off this multi decade debate that Jonathan's been talking about about whether the good people of Nevada would actually want such a thing and whether we had the money to pour into a ten thousand

years safe, ninety billion dollar site of this type. UM. In two thou To Yucco was designated as the best possible site for a disposal facility. But soon after, in two thousand and eight, the Obama administration started working to shut the whole thing down because of this whole not in my backyard and or funding debate stuff that was going on. Uh. And then in the Department of Energy

stopped the entire process of attempting to license the site. UM. Then the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board said, Uh, you can't do that. By law, you can't just stop this. You have to actually pass legislation one way or the other. You can't you can't be doing something that you've been legally bound to do. And then say I'm not doing it anymore, so that essentially we're talking about different government

offices fighting with each other, which always leads terrific things. Um. Finally, in the d C Court of Appeals, Washington, d C. That would be ruled that the process had to go forward legally speaking, being that the temporary thirty year safe facilities that are currently holding our nation's nuclear waste are insufficient um and cannot be extended for longer use without a really costly detailed analysis of the potential damage that

doing so will cause. Right if we if you know, the facilities that nuclear waste isn't right now, those weren't meant to be permanent homes for that stuff, right. They were meant to be this little temporary holding ground until we had a centralized geological repository where everything would go, and it was meant to be there, uh, for ten thousand years. We'll talk more about that ten thousand year thing in a little it too, so not a little bit in the next in the next podcast, we'll talk

about it. Yeah, I'm sorry, um, but it's you know, that's that's certainly one of the big tripping points of this whole process is the idea of having a facility where you have to designate it being safe for ten thousand years. That's a tough thing. Uh. So yeah, it's it's this is, like I said, a big political problem as well as a technical problem, as well as a health hazard. I mean, the multiple things coming into play here.

So yeah, I mean, what are we gonna do? And we've got all these states that all have very different ideas about what needs to happen. You've got the states where the nuclear waste currently resides and cannot legally stay there because the facilities that were built for them were not meant to be permanent ones. I think a lot of people honestly don't even realize it's there. Yeah, I just have no idea that I think a lot of people assume we already have facilities like yuck a MoU

is supposed to be. Yeah, and uh we will talk more about all of that in our next episode, where we'll go into more detail about the repositories that do exist here in the world. Um, they're including one that exists in the United States but is not a high level waste repository. There are no high level waste repositories out there, not yet. Anyway. Some of them are under consideration in different parts of the world. Some of them are under construction in different parts of the world, but

there are none existing yet. We will also talk about some alternative proposals. Yes, there are many alternative proposals out there. Some of them are bad, but some of them have lots and lots of potential. And and I'm excited at any rate about any of the work being done towards, you know, not killing us all some of the bad ones. Some of the bad ones have been considered and rejected. Some of the bad ones have been practiced and rejected

once people caught onto what was going on. But we'll talk all about that in our next episod, which will be just as cheerful as this one was. So the reason why we even tackled this problem in the first place is that it's actually one we need to solve. And and while it is a certain certainly a huge challenge, and I'm sure I'll stress this again in our next episode, human beings are amazing at overcoming challenges when we put our minds to it. We have to put our minds

to it, is the thing. So it doesn't mean you can just trust somebody to figure it out later. No, No, we have to. Yeah, let's not fall back on the someone smarter than me is working on this problem. No, but but I think that all three people here are pretty huge fans of nuclear energy, at least from among

the current options. Sure, if it's if it's practiced, if it's practiced, uh, you know, responsibly, then certainly I think it's a valid means of powering a nation, which means that we need a valid means of taking care of this waste because we do have to acknowledge that the waste is an issue and we have to make sure we we meet that problem. So we're going to talk

more about that in our next episode. Fear not, we'll be we'll be continuing this discussion, and if you guys have any suggestions for future topics we can talk about on Forward Thinking, let us know. You can drop us a line on Twitter, Google Plus, or Facebook or handle at all three is f w Thinking and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places