How Nuclear Power Plants Work

loaded subject and I will tackle it. But before I can handle that topic, I thought we would be good to do a couple of episodes about nuclear power to lead up to it, and that includes how nuclear power plants work today and how nuclear fusion reactors will work in the future if we ever suss out how to do them in a way that isn't a net loss on energy and is sustainable. So today's episode is going to be about new clear fission reactors. That's the kind

that we use today to generate electricity. Their nuclear power plants all across the world, and all of the ones that are not just pure research facilities are fission based. And then fusion is something that is in a research stage in various places around the world, and then this is actually gonna be a nuclear power week because we're going to talk about cold fusion in the third episode.

In the fourth episode, I think I'm going to take a really close look at some of the famous nuclear facility disasters, things like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Fukushima reactor and talk about what happened in each of those instances and what the consequences were, so that we can have a deep understanding. Now, this is not supposed to be a series that is meant to scare you

about nuclear power. I actually believe that nuclear power, if performed responsibly, is a good alternative to fossil fuel based power. But the responsibly part is absolutely of paramount importance. And we'll get into why as I talk about this. But this is not an anti nuclear power or even a pro nuclear power episode. It's just to kind of give us the understanding of what it is, what's going on,

what are the pros and the cons of it. So, fission means they use a process to generate energy that involves splitting one heavy atom into lighter atoms, and fusion is the opposite. You would take two or more lighter atoms and you squish them together real hard to make into a heavier atom, and both processes release energy, though a fusion reaction would release far more energy than a fission reaction. I'll explain how that is in the next episode.

But first, fission, well, it happens naturally with certain large unstable atoms. Uranium, for example, It will spontaneously undergo fission uranium two specifically, but it does so at a very slow rate. But you can speed that rate up through a process called induced fission. And generally speaking, induced fission happens when you take a heavy and unstable atom and you pelt it really hard with neutrons. You accelerate the neutrons and you shoot them at these heavy isotopes, and

those isotopes break up into smaller components. That process generates a lot of energy in the form of heat, and you can use that heat to heat up water, preferably in a separate, sealed system. Not all nuclear power plants work that way, but about two thirds of the US nuclear power plants do, And you convert the water into steam and use that steam to turn turbines conducted to

generators to produce electricity. Now, in a way today's nuclear power plants are really not all that different from coal power plants or thermal plants that use solar power to heat up water. And in all these cases, you use a process to either generate or harness heat. And you know, you can burn cold to do that, you can harness solar power to do that, you can use nuclear power to do that. Use that heat to boil water, to convert water into high pressure steam, and you direct that

steam to move turbines, and those turbines are electricity generators. Now, to be clear, the generators aren't generating energy because energy can be neither created nor destroyed. You can convert energy from one form to another. You can convert mass into energy, but you can't just create energy and of nothing. So electricity generators are converting some form of energy into electricity. Uh. With steam turbines, we're talking about converting kinetic energy, the

energy of movement, into electrical energy. And here's how that works. In a nutshell. Generators have many parts typically, but a really important component is the alternator. And inside the alternator you have a statter and you have a rotor. The statter stays motionless with respect to the generator. It's remains stationary motionless. The rotor, as a name suggests, rotates on its axis. So it rotates. Uh. Typically the statter has an iron core and you have conductive wire or cable

wrapped around that iron core. So you think about this, it sounds oh, it sounds like an electro magnet. Well, yeah, kind of. The rotor typically has permanent magnets or some other thing that generates a magnetic field, and as the rotor rotates, this magnetic field moves with the rotation. So

this is essentially a fluctuating magnetic field. And as we know, when you have a fluctuation magnetic field and you've got a a conductive wire that's wrapped around an iron core, that can induce or it does induce a voltage difference in that conductive material and that wire, and that voltage difference produces alternating current or a c electricity. There are

tons of different types of generators out there. Some of them burn fuel in a in an engine that creates the energy needed to move a motor, which in turn rotates the rotor. So you can take fuel, you can burn it in an engine and use that engine to work with a generator to produce electricity, so you just refill the uh that the engine whenever the fuel runs out, and you can keep on generating electricity this way, or you could use turbines that are turned by stuff like

wind or water. So with a typical steam turbine, you have a closed system in which a heat source heats up water until it boils and creates high pressure steam. That high pressure means the steam has got a lot of energy behind it, and the steam encounters the first

blades of the turbine. Typically turbines consist of multiple blades, and they start in a very kind of tight circle, and then as you go further into the turbine, the circles are getting bigger and bigger because steam expands as it's moving through this turbine system, and the fans are angled so that the push from the steam creates a rotational force on the turbine and it turns the rotor. So steam passes through the fan blades, it expands, it

keeps pushing those next series of fans. This is what allows you to create a very efficient steam turbine design, and it helps you capture as much of the energy from the steam as you can. The turbines shaft, like I said, is connected to the rotor of the electrical generator that produces the rotational energy that creates the fluctuating

magnetic field, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Now, the steam continues through the system after passing through the turbine, and it cools down as it does so typically through exposure to some other part of this system. And as it cools down, it condenses back into water and it flows back into the boiler where the whole process can start over again.

But again, with nuclear power, you're using a different material and process to create the heat than you would with a coal power plant, and there's a need to make sure the systems in a nuclear power plant are secure and separate from each other to prevent contamination, or at least shielded very very well if you have a full

implemented system. So if the water is actually passing through the reactor and that same water is the water that's converted into steam to pass with the turbine, you want to make sure that that facility is very well shielded. Most nuclear power plants have two water systems. They have one that's the coolant uh and then they have a secondary one where there's a heat exchanger that sends the heat from the coolant into this boiler, which then boils

off the water and create steam. And the two systems are separate. They don't they don't come into direct contact with each other, so you don't pass radioactive contaminants from the coolant into the steam that you're using to turn the turbines. Now, the isotope most commonly associated with nuclear power is uranium two thirty five, but plutonium two thirty nine is also used in some reactors, and there are some nuclear power proponents who really advocate a thorium based

power plant. More on that later in this episode. And I've said the word isotope a few times. Why does that actually mean. Well, isotopes are two or more forms of the same element, meaning uh, two or more forms

that all have the same number of protons. Because if you have different number of protons and you have different elements, so you're looking at two different atoms that represent the same element, and they have the same number of protons, but they have different numbers of neutrons from each other. Neutrons are particles have a neutral charge. You find them

in the nuclei of atoms. They don't affect the chemical properties of the element, but isotopes do have different atomic masses relative to one another, so they are chemically identical, but from a nuclear process perspective, they are different. So uranium two thirty five is as you would imagine an isotope of uranium. It is not the most commonly found form of uranium in nature. The most common form of uranium is uranium two thirty eight. Uranium two thirty eight

has ninety two protons and one forty six neutrons. Uranium two thirty five has ninety two protons and one forty three neutrons. Uranium two thirty five makes up less than one percent of all naturally occurring uranium in the world, and it has a half life of nearly seven hundred four million years, which means if you have a qual unto ty of uranium to thirty five any given amount. Let's say that you have a pound of uranium two thirty five. That's an enormous amount of uranium two thirty five.

But let's say you have a pound of it, it would take approximately seven four million years for that uranium two thirty five to reduce in half through radioactive decay, so you would end up with half a pound on average after seven four million years. More or less. This is essentially uh the rate of radioactive decay. But I think we could actually do a lot better than that if we really put our minds to it, And I'll explain how in just a second, but first let's take

a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, So, uranium two thirty five will spontaneously decay and release energy in the process, and when it decay as uranium two thirty five will split to create an alpha particle that's technically two protons and two neutrons that are bound together. Interestingly, there's no standard equation we can use to represent spontaneous fission for uranium two thirty five because the results are unpredictable. But if you were to trace the chain of decay,

the chain of decay goes like this. And pardon me, because this gets really kind of ridiculous to describe it all, but all right, you start with uranium two thirty five, and that decays into thorium two thirty one, which decays

into protact tenium. And I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that two thirty one that decays into actinium to twenty seven, which decays into thorium to twenty seven, which then decays into radium to twenty three, which then decays into rate on to nineteen, and then to polonium to fifteen, and then to lead to eleven, to bismuth to eleven, to thallium two oh seven, and then finally to lead too oh seven.

Lead to oh seven is a stable atom, so it will not decay at least not through any observable time frame that we can talk about, so that's a relief. But as I mentioned earlier, if uranium two thirty five gets hit with a high speed neutron, it can absorb that neutron and then undergo fission. So as the uranium two thirty five atom splits, it can release two or three more neutrons, which is also unpredictable. It all depends on how the uranium splits, but we cannot predict how

many neutrons would be given off by any one reaction. However, those two or three neutrons can then go and get absorbed by other uranium two thirty five atoms. If you have enough uranium two thirty five atoms concentrated in the same space, then the decay of one can affect another one, and if a neutron from one decaying uranium two thirty five atom hits another, then that will prompt another reaction.

So if you have the right concentration of uranium two thirty five, called a critical mass, you can have a sustained nuclear reaction. Now there has to be enough uranium two thirty five and the neutrons need to be moving at the right speed for that to happen. With lower concentrations of uranium two thirty five, you actually need to slow down the neutrons a bit in order to improve the chances that the existing uranium two thirty five atoms

will absorb that incoming neutron. So you would typically use another material like graphite to act like kind of like a set of breaks. They slow down the neutrons enough for the uranium two thirty five atoms to take them in and then split apart. That type of material is called a moderator. Use a moderator to moderate the speed of the neutrons. That reaction will sustain itself until the

amount of uranium two thirty five reduces below critical mass. Now, one atom of uran two thirty five will release about two hundred million electron volts worth of energy, which is actually not a very large amount of energy. So an electron vault is the amount of energy gained by the charge of an electron moved across an electric potential difference

of one vault. So two hundred million electron volts sounds like a lot, because two hundred million is a really big number, But a mosquito in flight has the kinetic energy of about one trillion electron volts, so it's a fraction of the energy of a mosquito flying. However, I did say a single decaying atom of uranium two thirty five releases two hundred million electron volts. That's just one atom.

If you've got a significant amount of uranium two thirty five, you're talking about billions or trillions of these atoms, and that adds up pretty darn fast. So individually the atoms don't have that much energy, but collectively they've got a whole bunch of it. In fact, in one hound of uranium, you have as much energy as three million pounds of coal, so very energy dense. When a uranium two thirty five atom splits, it also releases energy in the form of

heat and gamma radiation. It's not just splitting neutrons off, it's also releasing heat and gamma radiation, which is a high energy photons. In addition, the two new atoms that result from the fission of uranium two thirty five will undergo beta radiation, which means they release super fast electrons, and they also release more gamma radiation. A gamma radiation is pretty dangerous stuff. It will not turn you into the hook, it will hurt you very badly. So let's

talk about the innards of a nuclear reactor. So you've got to get a source of uranium two thirty five enriched uranium two thirty five. That means that there's a higher concentration of uranium two thirty five in your amount of uranium and you would find in nature. So if you went out in nature, you got yourself a pick, and you're going to an area that's rich in uranium. Can you mind yourself some uranium and you get a

big chunk of uranium. Most of the atoms of that uranium are going to be you two thirty eight, almost all of them. Uranium two thirty five would make up about point seven two of all the atoms in that sample you collected. That is not enough for you to be able to hit critical mass. You need to be at around two or three percent uranium two thirty five in the overall sample in order to have that sustainable nuclear reaction, which means you have to have enriched uranium.

You have to have uranium that has unnaturally high concentrations of uranium two thirty five. And you form these samples of enriched uranium into pellets. Now, each pellet is a cylinder that's about two and a half centimeters long or about an inch long, and they have a diameter of around eighteen millimeters round points seven inches, so in other words, they are about the diameter of a US dime. And you take these little cylindrical pellets and you put them

end to end to form rods, uranium rods. You then collect bunches of those rods into what are called bundles. The bundles you put into a pressure vessel that's filled with water, and the water access you're coolant. These nuclear reactions generate a lot of heat, and without a coolant, that amount of heat would be high enough to actually melt the rods themselves. That rods would overheat through these reactions and we get hotter than the melting point for uranium.

This is what we in the BIZ call a nuclear melt down, and it is a bad thing to have happen, so you have to have that coolant there. Another preventive measure against overheating are the control rods. Control rods are made out of a material that can absorb neutrons. Now, remember, the sustained nuclear reaction of a nuclear power plant involves uranium two thirty five emitting these neutrons and then absorbing incoming neutrons, emitting, splitting, and emitting more neutrons, and that's

what keeps the reaction going. So if you put in material that can absorb those neutrons, you're taking away the trigger that would continue to allow this nuclear reaction to happen. So you can actually use these sort of robotic arms to lower or raise the control rods out of the bundles of uranium to and by uh by putting them into the bundles, you absorb more of those neutrons, so

you can reduce the rate of nuclear reaction. You can even stop it completely if you if you leave it in there long enough and you have enough of the control rods there, or you can lift it out of the bundles to allow more of those reactions to occur, to increase the reactions, And it all depends on how things are going on in the core at any given time, and uh, if the reaction is ramping up too quickly lower a rod in the bundle soak up some neutrons

prevent those YouTube thirty five atoms and the bundles from doing it and pushing the reaction even further. Now, in some reactors, the coolant isn't water at all, It might be something else. There are a few that use gas based coolants like carbon dioxide, or they might use liquid metals like sodium or potassium. That generally allows you to operate at a higher temperature than you would if you were using water, but that also could mean that you're

burning through fuel a lot faster. So in some reactors, like the third of the ones that are in the United States, the coolant is in fact the water that gets converted into steam and eventually pushes a turbine. But again that can be risky because that coolant has been in direct contact with the radioactive materials. So if that steam were to escape him, then that could be a

potential hazard for the surrounding environment. Generally, most of the power plants in the United States use pressurized water reactors and a secondary closed system of water for the purposes of turning the turbines. Two thirds of the power plants the United States use this approach. So you have the water the coolant that's inside your nuclear reactor under a tremendous amount of pressure, and that pressure prevents the water from boiling off. It remains liquid, so it's superheated liquid

that cannot boil because of that pressure. But that superheated liquid is in contact with a heat exchanger, and the heat exchanger transfers heat to the water that's inside a boiler, and that water can boil off, turn into steam, and turn steam turbines, but it's in its own closed, parallel system, so the two systems don't actually share any water between the two of them, and that way you have one relatively clean system of water that's consistently being heated to steam,

turning turbines, condensing back into water and starting over again, and then you have the other one that's acting as the coolant for your actual reactor. Two thirds of the power plants in the United States use that approach. The steam that powers the turbine has to cool off in order to condense back into water, so some plants will use water from natural resources like lakes or streams to

cool that steam using another form of heat exchange. So the steam exchanges heat, it transfers heat to the water from the lake or stream, and then as a result, the steam itself starts to cool down because it's pushed that heat energy off to a different source and turns into water. Other nuclear power plants have those really tall cooling towers. Those are those iconic, enormous chimney like structures

that we tend to associate with nuclear power plants. Like if you watch the Simpsons, you see that that iconic shape of the cooling towers next to the power plant in in Springfield. So for every unit of electricity produced by a power plant, it about two units of waste heat get transferred to the environment. But that's just heat. It's it is heat, but it's not greenhouse gas, so it's not something that contributes to climate change on a

global scale. You get some regionalized heating, but it's temporary, So that's good. But nuclear power plants obviously create some real challenges. What are those Well, I'll tell you in just a second, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Because the energy from a nuclear reactor includes stuff that can really cause harm to humans in various ways, the nuclear reactor itself has to be heavily shielded to prevent that radiation from getting out into

the general environment. Typically, the reactor has a concrete liner to act as a radiation shield, and around that line inner so one layer out. Think of it as an onion. So you've got a reactor at the core of the onion that you've got a peel of the onion. Layer

of the onion that is the concrete liner. Then you have another layer around that that's a steel containment vessel, and then the power plant itself is typically made out of very thick concrete that access sort of a final layer of protection between the reactor and the surrounding area if all else were to fail. In addition, the spent

fuel in a fission reactor is itself radioactive. It contains a lot of different radioactive materials in it of various uh half life's so some of those half lives are on the matter of days or a couple of years, but others last a lot longer. The equipment and parts of a nuclear power plant can absorb energy and become radioactive as well. That is what we call low level radioactive material or radioactive waste. UH that is much lower in radioactivity and in potential danger than say, spent fuel is.

But however, this all creates challenges when it comes to what do you do with that stuff? What do you do with this waste? It's still dangerous. It emits a lot of energy, It will eventually corrode whatever container you put it into, and it will stay dangerous for thousands of years, in some cases tens of thousands with high level radiation, and it decays very slowly into stable forms, but it'll do so long after we're gone. Keep in mind ten thousand years. That's the length of human history.

So this waste, some of it will remain dangerously radioactive, as in the type of radiation it gives off could cause harm for thousands of years. The most dangerous stuff tends to decay much faster, but it's not really that reassuring, So we have to figure out what do we do with this stuff? Well, nuclear power plants produce about two

thousand metric tons of nuclear waste every year. Back in the nineteen sixties, one plan for dealing with waste involved reprocessing the nuclear waste in order to produce new fuel, and one of those products of reprocessing is plutonium, and plutonium two thirty eight can be used as a nuclear fuel. You make it by bombarding uranium two thirty eight with neutrons, so uranium two thirty five. When you do that, that's what you have as a uh fission fuel. Uranium two

thirty eight. You can't use that to create a sustainable fission reaction, but you can bombard it with neutrons to create plutonium two thirty eight, which in turn is a good source for fission fuel. So that was a possibility. However, plutonium two thirty eight can also be used to make nuclear weapons, and in the nineteen seventies, US President Jimmy Carter argued that reprocessing nuclear fuel presented a grave secure risk that the plutonium produced would be attempting target for

agents that wish to create nuclear weapons. You could have terrorists or foreign net agents that we're trying to get hold of that plutonium. At least that was Carter's argument, and so reprocessing was kind of put on the shelf. It was said, well, we're not gonna allow that process to happen because it's too dangerous. In addition, on top of that, reprocessing fuel was seen as being really expensive, and it was generally thought that mining new uranium fuel

made more economic sense. So you can kind of see this in other areas too, Like in recycling. There are certain materials where recycling makes incredible sense because the amount of energy and money you spend recycling that material is less than what it would take for you to mine and process new material. But some stuff like glass glass is so easy to make that re cycling it is a tough sell because the process of recycling glass takes about as much energy and effort as it would take

to make brand new glass. Well, that was kind of the argument that the nuclear industry was making about reprocessing. They said, yeah, we could make more efficient use of this fuel, but it's not like it's super cheap to do compared to just getting new fuels, So why should we invest and these reprocessing facilities which will cost a huge amount of money to create and then maintain when we can just keep mining the stuff that's already there.

So there are two big arguments against reprocessing in the seventies. But that would mean that we would have two different sets of nuclear power plants, because you would use one that has uranium two thirty five that would produce the neutrons that you could then use to create the plutonium two thirty nine. And uh so you've got the uranium two power plants. Those are generating a ectricity, and then

you've got the plutonium two thirty nine power plants. Those are generating electricity to thirty five is feeding the fuel into the two thirty nine plutonium ones. So they would becomes what we would call a breeder plant. We call them breeders because they create the fuel that will be

used in a different facility. So the idea was that, hey, you've got a much more efficient use of the material because you're you're able not actually to use it twice, but you're able to use more of the material you have mind to produce electricity, and that's how power plants

in countries like France operate to this day. You have some that are essentially those breeders, and you have others that are plutonium two thirty nine plants, and so in France of their electricity comes from nuclear power, which means that if there's an oil crisis or even a uranium crisis, they're still in pretty good shape because most of their power plants depend on plutonium, and you don't need that much uranium to start producing plutonium in amounts large enough

to create electricity. So France argues that their emphasis on nuclear power gives them more national security because they depend less on foreign countries to produce the fuel they need. Critics of Jimmy Carter's plan said that while plutonium might have presented attempting target, it would actually in practicality be very difficult to pull off a successful plutonium heist or an attack. But as of now in the United States,

reprocessing is a moot point. So that still leaves the question what are we to do with nuclear waste at the moment. Various sites around the world are acting as temporary holding facilities. There's some permanent ones in other parts of the world, but in the United States, the plants that produce the waste are the ones that are storing the waste on site, so usually the first step is to store the way to what are called spent fuel

cooling pools. Uh. These are enormous tanks filled with circulating water, and you put the spent fuel in there to keep the fuel from overheating through its own natural radioactive decay. But as those pools fill up, you gotta do something else with that spent fuel. So spent nuclear fuel at that point tends to be merged with glass. We we've vitrified in glass, and then we store that in steel and concrete casks, which are incredibly thick and secure, and

in turn we put those in cooled, heavily shielded facilities. Now, there have been several sites suggested as long term storage facilities, since the stuff is going to be radioactive for tens of thousands of years, so we need to find a place to put it that's going to be far away from people, far away from other elements of the environment that could possibly contaminate, like sources of water, that kind

of thing. But understandably, people living in the general area around those per post sites aren't too keen to have nuclear waste nearby, even if it is under tons of stone like beneath Yuck a mountain in Nevada. Now that particular site is the one that has been proposed as the long term storage facility of the United States. But Nevada does not have any nuclear power plants of its own, so the state would be accepting incoming spent nuclear fuel from other states. Now, that is to put it lightly

a hard sell. I mean, imagine, let's say that we're talking about garbage instead. And let's say that the state has somehow managed to create a system where they are producing net zero garbage. Somehow they're able to process the garbage to the point where they don't need any garbage facilities because they're not generating any And then they get notifications from all these states nearby that say, hey, we

want to put our garbage in your state. Well, most states are going to say, no, we we fixed our problem. We don't need to take your garbage. That's kind of the way it was with Nevada. And there's there are tons of different groups that oppose the storage of nuclear waste and yucka mountain for lots of different reasons. There are cultural groups that oppose it for that reason. There are state and regional groups that oppose it for kind of in that not in my backyard sort of approach.

There are i'd say, there are people on the nuclear power proponents side who would describe some of these reactions as knee jerk. I think that's being a little unfair, because, for one, the concept of harm from nuclear waste is one that has been deeply ingrained in the American psyche through pop culture and through news reports. So the general American has a very negative view of what might happen with nuclear waste should something go wrong, So naturally you

don't want it near you. Also, uh, you know, unless you're talking about significant economic uh support going into a state like Nevada, which does not have its own nuclear power plants, to say hey, you'll you'll be the site for this stuff. We're putting it in a place that nobody can go and it's far, far far away from anybody, so there's not going to be any issues with contamination. But in return, we're also going to give your state the x amount of money in federal funding for being

the site of this. That might go a long way if you can make a very convincing argument that the whole process is safe and reliable. But getting past that hump is very difficult. To do, because again, people have a concept that nuclear waste is such a dangerous and undesirable thing that it's really hard to reassure them that there is a way to do this responsibly. Now, as of the recording of this podcast, Yuckum is essentially a

no go. The Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have both requested money from Congress to continue the work building out a repository, but both have encountered stiff resistance from the government. The Obama administration ended federal funding in two thousand eleven and launched a new review for potential long term storage sites. And we're kind of in a holding pattern because since then the answer has been the same. The government has sort of refused to entertain

the idea of funding the Yucca Mountain repository. Meanwhile, the infrastructure for nuclear power plants is aging towards the projected end of their estimated lifespans, and facilities are having to store waste on site indefinitely. So these nuclear power plants, when they were built, they were built with the engineers saying, this facility, we're rating this facility for us, let's say forty years. We think this facility will be able to work at full capacity for forty years, and after that

we're gonna have to build a new one. We're gonna have to renovate this one, we're gonna have to fix it, whatever it may be. And we're getting in on that time, and some of them are past that time, and unless more money comes into uh totally you know, refurbish or to build new facilities, those will be going offline one by one. We've seen quite a few go offline since

the really since the eighties and moving forward. So uh, it's it's tough because we don't have a place to put the waste, and we're starting to shut down these nuclear power plants, and because we don't have an answer of what to do with that waste, it's really hard to build new nuclear power plants, uh, even though they currently produce about twenty of the electricity that the United States uses. So eventually, if those all those power plants go dark, you've got to figure out where that is

going to come from. Because our demand for electricity isn't going down, it's going up every year. So that puts a huge pressure on us to figure out where else are we going to get this electricity? And the easiest answer is fossil fuels, but we already know fossil fuels contribute to climate change. They produce pollutants that are environmental and health hazards, So not a great story. Now it's

easier to store low level waste. That stuff I was telling you about where it's the equipment or the uniforms is stuff like that stuff that was in the power plant and absorbed radiation over time. Uh, But those materials pose much less of a threat than spent nuclear fuel. They will tend to uh have their radiation completely diminished within three years, which is still a long time, but a heck of a lot shorter than tens of thousands

of years. And again, like I said, some of the most hazardous radioactive materials have a half life of around ten years or less, but not all them do. And that's the problem. So telling someone, hey, within twenty years, most of the stuff won't even be a problem anymore isn't necessarily the biggest winning argument you can make to someone when you're trying to store nuclear waste. There. In addition to all that, building nuclear power plants became economically challenging.

It's very expensive to build one, not just because the technology is sophisticated and complicated and you've got to have a lot of materials, but also there's a lot of bureaucracy surrounding the process. Not that the bureaucracy doesn't serve a purpose. They're very strict protections and regulations that are in place to require facilities to be built and operate

under safe guidelines. Those are absolutely necessary. There's a history of of facilities that we're not operating up to those guidelines, and that is not just criminal, but potentially deadly. So those regulations and restrictions end up adding to the cost obviously, and while nuclear power has compelling positive arguments compared to a again like coal power plants, it might make more economic sense to look elsewhere if you're getting into the

energy biz. And then of course we have the famous disasters, stuff like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. And as I said, I'm going to do an episode soon that explains what happened in each of those three cases and what we learned as a result of those. But they certainly have gone a long way to discourage support for

nuclear power. If you can point to a disaster that's a pretty powerful con argument, and earlier I mentioned thorium reactors as a proposed alternative to the traditional you two thirty five ones. These reactors wouldn't use thorium itself for fuel. Rather, a facility would process thorium two thirty two and create

an isotope called uranium two thirty three. Uranium two thirty three is unstable, you will not find it out in nature, but it is fiscile, meaning like you two thirty five, you can create a sustained nuclear reaction using this fuel. In addition, proponents say thorium based plants would produce less nuclear waste, they would be more efficient at producing energy, and thorium is more plentiful than uranium. Now I'll have to do a full episode about thorium plants, but that

that's further in the future. I'm not gonna do more than one week of nuclear power stories at a time. I'll revisit that. But here's one fun local fact, something that you guys can look forward to. I learned that, and I'm amazed that I'd never heard this before, But I live within an hour of a radiated site, and I learned about this in a book titled Atomic Awakening. By James Mahaffee, and the radiated site is now known

as the Dawson Forest Wildlife Area. That's about fifty miles north of Atlanta, the city where I live, and formerly this was the Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory, which was a top secret R and D facility operated by the Air Force. And the story behind it is really interesting and I think I'm actually gonna take a little trip with guys from stuff they don't want you to know, and we're all going to visit it with Geiger counters. So stay tuned for that. I'm sure I'll give a glowing review.

That about wraps it up for this episode of tech Stuff. In our next episode, I'll talk about fusion reactors. If you guys have any suggestions for future topics I should cover, whether it's a technology, a company, person in tech, whatever it may be, send me an email. The address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle it both of those is text Stuff H s W. Don't forget to go to t public dot com slash tech

stuff for all your tech stuff merchandise needs. There's some cool designs in there. I really like them a lot. I'm sure you guys will too. See if you can take the captured test and prove to me that you're not a robot. Also, don't forget follow us on Instagram and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works? Dot com m