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hi and welcome to technically speaking a podcast where scientists and engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm amina and in this episode i'm joined by laura cara and antonia to talk about nuclear waste and to offer our viewpoints on how it can be managed so to start off with i'm going to pick on cara why do you care about nuclear waste so i care about nuclear waste because i spent quite a few years doing research around
the social value of nuclear decommissioning which is the end of life of nuclear power plants and obviously a big part of that is what happens to the nuclear waste that comes out of those power plants um especially ones which have been around for decades now they've been producing waste for a long time so we want to make sure that um we have a plan for where that goes to but the people who i speak to in the industry who are talking about the nuclear waste and what they plan to do
with it have spoken about creating a geological disposal facility and finally a community community for that in the uk and they've said actually it'll probably be before um not before they've retired in their current jobs that they'll even see where this site will be and we will start going into the ground that might be kind of exaggerating slightly but that's kind of how they see things for some of the older people who've been working in this for a long time
this is something which is like really really long term and we need to kind of really think about how what we do today is going to affect generations in the future um so it is a real intergenerational issue with lots of social impacts that come out of it so that's yeah i really see the people involved with this is something really interesting yeah that's a really interesting point of view because um not all industries have something like that which affects multi-generation so
it's it's an important point to raise um and laura why do you care about nuclear waste for me i mean i've been sort of working with it one way or another for over 10 years now and it's quite an interesting topic um it's also not that well understood i guess because it's really coming out in the media all that much a lot of people don't really know what it is i mean i was reading an article just yesterday when it started off with draw me a picture of nuclear waste and i think the
inference was that very few people can because very few people are familiar with it and i thought that that is actually spot on i mean i'm not even sure that i could entirely draw a very good picture of nuclear waste because you never really get to just like physically handle it and pick it up and do anything with it it's always like it's this remote thing that doesn't really feature in people's lives all that much and it includes a lot of different types of things so i guess it's
it's one of those things it's you can't just pinpoint it and say this is nuclear waste but there's so many forms of nuclear waste antonia why do you care about nuclear waste so i've been looking at um sort of the electricity system in the uk and seeing what's sort of feasible um from an environmental point of view in the future so you know as we go towards low carbon we got to use more renewables and you know some particular environmentalists like greenpeace might have
campaigned against nuclear in the past and so you know looking at environmental impacts on a sort of life cycle basis does it sort of hold water in the kind of fact based if we could quantify the environmental impact so from my point of view you know knowing how the nuclear waste might um contribute to nuclear's environmental impact might sort of make or break it as a future um energy source yeah definitely that's a really interesting point of view so we have three very varied
sort of point of view here we now know that why everyone's interested in it so how about we find out more what nuclear waste is and laura would you be the best person for that yeah i can i can give you my perspective on it um i guess it's worth pointing out that nuclear waste could be considered as anything that comes from a nuclear-licensed site but it's quite important to realize that not all of the waste that comes from a nuclear site is radioactive which is usually the main hazard that we
associate with nuclear so some of the waste that comes from nuclear sites comes from places like the canteen or just offices where people do printing and filing and whatever else and there are also examples like the mud that was removed from hinckley point c while it was being constructed which made the headlines um because it was um being disposed of in just offshore um but none of it was radioactive so it could be handled in the same way as general waste
that's interesting so when we talk about nuclear waste is it better to talk about radioactive waste then yeah that's the general consensus from the regulatory point of view certainly um i think it's also helpful to look at the history of the nuclear industry which helps puts it in context the uk has a relatively long nuclear heritage we were the first nation to produce electricity from a nuclear power station on an industrial scale and that was in 1956 so uh well
certainly longer than i've been alive anyways quite a long time ago since then we've built around 20 power stations and roughly 20 of our electricity comes from nuclear power today um and the the nuclear industry is predicted to generate just over 5 million tons of radioactive waste over its entire lifetime and most of that is from the historic operations over the previous 60 years or so and that amounts quite tiny when you consider that uk households and businesses generate just over
5 million tons of hazardous waste every single year and that the total amounts of waste generated in by the uk in a single year is 221 million tons and of that about 27 million tons came from just uk households so even though there's a much smaller amount of radioactive waste generated it needs to be managed in a different way to general waste which i guess is quite an important distinction yeah that's a very important distinction because i don't think everyone would perhaps
think of it that way um and it's really interesting how you're saying how much waste is produced outside of that and the comparison is just it it's staggering really how much is actually radioactive then so how is radioactive waste managed then it's kept separate from other types of waste so it's usually monitored to decide if it is radioactive below or above background levels of radiation i should say it's usually encapsulated in some form of grouts or turned into glass which
makes it easier to handle by fixing lots of small items or liquids into a large solid block it's also usually kept behind some sort of shielding to protect us from the radiation and like most waste as cara mentioned the plan is to dispose of it responsibly in an underground or a geological disposal facility and right now it's up to communities to come forward that would be interested in hosting such a facility so it's a very well thought out process of how these things need to proceed i guess
perhaps on the surface of it it doesn't really show how how much thought is sort of gone into all of this the waste management facility and everything will get considered in safety case sort of analysis which is like right at the very beginning before even anything even happens i wonder if people think that it comes as an afterthought like oh we've produced all this radioactive waste now now how are we going to manage it's really not like that like it's the other way around
okay cool so radioactive waste is managed really carefully but how do you think that this would affect your community so say if this was coming into your community what do you think their concerns would be kara oh i don't know laura you just said you packed like losing numbers until it caught us like a short piece of time in a really interesting way so you're making me think about this quite a lot that was really helpful thank you and it's making me kind of get like super
philosophical about this and i guess it's like as a community what do we mean by waste you know what to be defined as waste and it's like interesting to say that in the 50s like we didn't consider radioactive waste in the same way so in 50 years time will we again in 200 years time how will we redefine it 50 years ago we didn't really recycle anything so and now we do recycle stuff so what we call and then moving forward with the whole secular economy idea like nothing should even be going to
waste at all so how do we start recycling are repurposing that so i don't know there's just so many questions around what we define as waste so from me talking about the social perspective in terms of the community wanting to kind of consider bringing this into like their area i i i've heard it mentioned before that the huge challenge of this is how do you communicate what's underground to somebody in 600 years time will you use floppy disks will you print it on paper will you have like a yellow
sign outside and by calling that something will it mean the same thing in 600 years time so to me that's a really big thing it was like how can you tell me you're going to communicate what's better than drinking my house to my great grandkids and that sounds it starts to get very philosophical in a way but that's it's actually a very valid thing and actually up on it's called the nucleus archive which is where they built the big archive up in the very north coast of scotland where
they're moving all the archive documents from all nuclear sites as well as other sites around the uk um to store them in a really great proper archive facility where it's all paper documents and has been digitized as well but things like i think is it cds or like really bad they like they degraded really fast and this is something that's coming around they don't know what's in cell phil because the records were so bad so how do we make sure that what records
we have now are going to be good for the future also just imagining um in the future will we have moved away from cds dvds usb the internet you know how do we keep that digitally hopefully we still speak the same language but you know english is also involved so yeah really philosophical questions yeah language is always evolving much like nuclear waste that's how we tend to think of it because it was changing under its own radiation view [Laughter] oh i love it
but yeah you know we look at we look at the pyramids we don't know what's in there with the red hieroglyphs so like how are we going to communicate to somebody in ten thousand years and they're like digging up in like oh we open this new mine where we dig out these really great resources i don't know yeah but how likely is it so it's gonna be what sort of between what i want to say is it 200 meters or more it's quite it could be quite deep couldn't it is it likely that people
would be digging down that low to um look for minerals if technology is evolving and we should becoming more efficient at using the resources that we have maybe they'll just get really good at digging deeper and deeper in the future instead of building skyscrapers we'll be tunneling underground [Laughter] yeah yeah and so i think actually a good comparison of this is um the sites which they're trying to decommission so sites like choice finis in saturday in the middle of snowdonia national park
um they have planned to leave the nuclear site as it is close the gates walk away for 60 years so everything gets a bit safer and then they come back and then try and clean it up and they've actually moved away from this idea now because they said in 60 years time how can we even guarantee the skill set will still be there that we will still have that same knowledge a few generations away um and they've said actually we need to manage the risk between what the radioactive risk
is now and actually wanted like just shunting that down the line in the future and kind of people not knowing how to deal with it um so yeah so i think the gdf maybe what happens if in a hundred years time there's a politician who decides that there's some kind of benefit to them digging things up and moving it somewhere um i don't know it's just it's basically it's the uncertainty of humans being weird that we kind of really can't really plan for you can't really plan for the future
though can you i guess the best thing you can do is act properly according to the information that you have currently we don't know what kind of facilities are going to be available available to us in the future i mean we might have far better technology far better understanding of things and we might have something even better to do but we just need to do it best to the best of our knowledge i guess yeah yeah what i find quite interesting about this discussion is that we're
talking about how weird human behavior is and we can't predict what we'll be doing in the future but right now there are like hundreds of researchers around the globe that are working on understanding how the radioactive waste will look as it changes over time and how that will behave in the future so we seem to be characterizing the behavior of the waste much more thoroughly than we are characterizing human behavior if you like one of the one of the things we're doing
with that all that knowledge is figuring out how to make this underground storage facility as sealed and as safe as possible and as far away from people we can protect that so much better than we can people's motives changing yeah so do do we know what kind of uh radiation radiation levels the community could potentially be exposed to and and um how the waste will be managed in the future do we do we know anything about that as of just now like what the plans are um i think from
from my days as a nuclear safety consultant um there are definitely calculations done to estimate how much radioactivity will be released from the containers that the waste will be in and so one of the calculations they've done is what they take um people that are most likely to be exposed to the waste as it's being transported is what i was working on this is quite a while ago and they take into account like people that hang around train stations quite a lot which would have been me actually
because i travel on the train a lot i used to live right next to a train station um and the the radiation exposure that you're talking about is is very low um you probably get more exposure from traveling on a few transatlantic flights a year and i think that's a fair point that's been able to make those comparisons communicating it to the people who might want to come forward in the area where they might put the waste to say okay well this is you know realistically what you are going to get
but then that becomes a challenge there's some countries where they have kind of gone ahead and they've identified communities where um sometimes it can be kind of accused that you're saying like oh this isn't that bad and like think of all these really great benefits you'll get out of hosting it here but which sounds like you're kind of trying to bargain with them but the reality is that there will be industrial employment benefits for quite a while and do you want to put that in
the same conversation as what the risk of the radioactivity is especially the radioactivity is so low but kind of reiterating that it's so low and it's really safe maybe kind of draws attention to the wrong thing it becomes kind of this like balance of how you what is the most important thing to be communicating to people in which people want to hear what part of the story the communication needs to be well managed yeah the language yeah well managed but i think no one
really knows exactly how to do that yet if we backtrack a bit what sort of volumes of waste would we put in a geological disposal facility i don't know what the numbers are having spout with a load of numbers like relating to tonnage um but the volume is about the same volume as wembley stadium oh okay which is kind of impressive to think about if you're excavating a wembley stadium several hundred meters underground oh the one facility will be that size i think so yeah
oh wow well the waste volumes anyway i think the idea is there'll be like different sort of caverns holding the different types of waste underground yeah yeah i've heard of that as well and i think there's an idea to sort of segregate it based on how the weight is classified was kind of related to activity content and i guess i mean the main reason for doing this is there are lots of really like long-lived radio ice tubes so let's all like be very radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years
and we're putting it underground so it's decayed away after that amount of time so are we saying that we're we're putting sort of high level waste mostly rather than low level waste and is that also going down in the geological disposal facility there's already a facility to um dispose of low-level waste it's on the coast of west cumbria and i think the idea is that that will decay away relatively quickly and it's got an awful lot of criteria for what counts as waste it can be
disposed of there and that's been operating for quite a long time so the geological disposal facility is basically for the high level waste then yeah yeah there's stuff that will be radioactive for a bit longer and therefore needs to wait we need to think like many generations into the future if this stuff is still radioactive do we still want future generations to be handling it or can we deal with it now and get it further away from human exposure so it's like kara mentioned
sort of retaining skill sets and whatever else and having communities managing these wastes for decades to come if we can avoid that then we probably should hence the point of geological disposal it's an interesting conversation we went from well yes there's nuclear waste but then there's different forms of nuclear waste and what we actually do with all the nuclear waste is dependent on what type of radioactivity it has essentially so it's not just that everything that comes out of the power
plant is going to be classified as nuclear waste it could just be classified as regular waste and that could be managed in in a perfectly normal ways as a parting note is does anybody want to add something i haven't really touched on how essential nuclear power is that you know if we did say okay even if we don't use any more nuclear power we still have waste to manage but also are we definitely going down the nuclear power route in the future so you know to secure our current
energy supply it it seems like across the world that nuclear plays a part so making sure we manage that waste is essential part of the planning process to make sure it's sustainable for future generations because the the type of power that nuclear plants supply is different from other low-carbon energy sources so you know the way solar and wind gives out electricity is is not controllable in the same way that nuclear is and the base load that we have of just needing a certain amount all the time
might not always be met by renewables without storage and storage is quite an expensive avenue right now and nuclear actually is a cheaper option because we have more experience with it so i think that could be a a point to add into conversation of how essential nuclear kind of is in our immediate energy supply that's a really good point that it's it's a it's part of the mix and it's here to say so we we should do it responsibly i think it's a very interesting point antonio made about it
being cheaper because you often hear it's the way around but nuclea's really expensive and i also wonder whether there can be some extra benefit from like the waste and turning it into a product um because you often hear that some of the components in the waste could be used for other purposes um for example extracting the the americium the radioactive americium isotopes that are in there and using those to make batteries and you do occasionally here talk about
um nuclear derived batteries um we could discuss that in a future episode definitely repurpose nuclear waste and what that may look like that could be an interesting podcast so it's not called waste anymore yeah we're back to your circular economy [Laughter] definitely we hope that you've enjoyed this podcast and please contact us through our twitter handle the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization
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