Can Nuclear Waste Ever Be Solved? Yes.

have we solved the problem of nuclear waste here's some music to scare you if you live in one of these countries you have a problem these are the places that are sitting on over 100 tons of radioactive high-level nuclear waste this is the deadly waste that has been slowly piling up from power plants hospitals and weapons programs for the past 70 years and it's dangerous and costing you money nuclear waste is going to keep building and building until we're completely overwhelmed and the whole planet becomes a toxic Wasteland at least that's what some people would have you believe and it's going to bankrupt us and there's no way to deal with something so dangerous that's going to be so radioactive for thousands of years and the solution is to do what stop everything sit on our hands and do nothing the problem appears so difficult and so overwhelming that it feels like the only solution is to do nothing nuclear energy has been shown to be a reliable low-carbon source of energy to meet our growing needs but with it comes the issue of nuclear waste we've seen a huge shift in the acceptance of nuclear power in Just the last even two or three years especially as a means to meet targets for carbon emissions the number of new plans announced and starting constructions is the highest it's been in a long time the vast majority of these are similar to The over 400 reactors that are already operating around the world and these plants are continuously generating literally tons of nuclear waste that must be dealt with potentially for a very very long time up to tens of thousands maybe even hundreds of thousands of years regardless of your position on nuclear power the fact is that it does exist and we must do something with all of that waste it's certainly too dangerous to leave lying around or just bury it and forget about it right if you look at what we do now it seems we've managed to find some solutions here and there but are these really sustainable for the long term after all if we had the answers wouldn't we see them being implemented everywhere so while we continue to pile up more and more let's dive in and see what the reality of the situation is of nuclear waste like every other type of energy producing technology nuclear energy does make some waste products throughout the lifetime of a plant when a nuclear reactor is operating it will produce a variety of waste from everyday things like the workers gloves and tools to components filters and water treatment to the spent uranium fuel itself the most common types of plants rely on uranium Fuel and water for cooling so that's where most of the waste has come from other types of reactors I'll get to later so be sure to stick around now all of these products can broadly be called nuclear waste because they give out some amount of radiation this radioactivity could be harmful if it was released out into the environment so we have to take certain measures to protect it we do this by categorizing nuclear waste into different groups depending on how radioactive it is the first is low level waste which makes up 90 percent of the total volume of waste from a nuclear plant these are lightly contaminated items like tools or clothing used by the employees working in the plant they're normally not very contaminated and typically can be stored in the plan until the radioactivity has decayed away enough that these items can be disposed of as ordinary trash or possibly sent off to a special low-level waste facility where it can be buried the next category is intermediate level waste which makes up about seven percent of the total volume this can be things like filters steel components from the reactor or concentrated products like Wastewater this kind of waste may require isolation for many years but generally Isn't So radioactive that things like continuous cooling are required this kind of waste typically can be buried underground at a depth of 10 to 100 meters now the last category is what people normally think of when they hear nuclear waste and that's high level waste this is mostly the spent nuclear fuel that has already operated inside the reactor however by volume it's pretty small it makes up only about three percent of the total waste but by radioactivity it's by far the largest accounting for 95 percent of all the categories of nuclear waste it also continuously gives off heat and will need to be safely managed for thousands of years years that's why when we talk about nuclear waste it's usually high level waste that we're worried about but how dangerous is it really although spent nuclear fuel is a hazard one thing we do need to keep in mind is that the volume of waste is relatively small compared to other sources it'll vary but an individual person's electricity needs in a developed country for an entire year would produce as little as 5 grams of high level waste the same weight as a single sheet of paper scaled up to a typical 1000 megawatt Nuclear Station which is enough for three million people it would produce only three cubic meters of high level waste per year if the used fuel is recycled in comparison a 1 000 megawatt coal plant will produce around 300 000 tons of Ash and more than 6 million tons of carbon dioxide every year and unlike the solid nuclear waste that is kept controlled on the site at the plant most of the coal waste goes up into the atmosphere air pollution from coal and other fossil plants is directly responsible for millions of deaths each year estimated to be as high as one in five deaths worldwide according to a Harvard study in 2021 so in summary nuclear plants produce a relatively small volume of solid-spent nuclear fuel that can be controlled while fossil plants freely send large amounts of carbon dioxide and Ash up into the atmosphere but as you probably know that doesn't mean that spent nuclear fuel is harmless there are serious health and environmental risks that must be managed when dealing with high-level waste direct exposure at one meter from freshly discharged spent nuclear fuel will kill a person within minutes if not seconds and it won't be pretty another thing to keep in mind is that radioactive material decays over time to become less toxic after the first 10 years spent nuclear fuel will lose about 85 percent of its radioactivity and after 100 years it loses 98 percent that last two percent is still dangerous though and will take upwards of one hundred thousand years to Decay away so we have to protect people in the environment and we do that by shielding the radiation luckily we know how to do this very well when the spent fuel is freshly removed from a reactor it is usually under about 10 meters of water in an area of the plant cleverly named the spent fuel pool or spent fuel Pond the spent fuel will spend at least five years here but possibly longer up to 20 years since the spent fuel is very radioactive and still gives off a fair amount of heat covering it in water in the Spen fuel pool does two things one water is a pretty good shield for radiation so it's effective inexpensive and easily replaced and two the water provides cooling to the spent fuel since it gives off some heat but this does mean that the Spen fuel pool needs continuous Cooling and additional water to counter evaporation or eventually the water will heat up and boil off as the water level drops that means the water that was shielding and cooling the spent fuel will eventually disappear and directly expose the spent fuel to the atmosphere this could lead to the solid fuel degrading and releasing radioactive particles so the spent fuel pool needs essentially continuous cooling through pumps and heat exchangers to maintain the appropriate temperatures and water levels to make sure the fuel remains covered in the pool okay we know high level waste is dangerous so what are we doing with it well the short answer is not much around the world the majority of the spent fuel is stored at the same site that produced it in those pools most plants are designed to have a capacity of around 20 years worth of on-site storage space this means that all the spent nuclear fuel can be underwater in a concrete building that is attached to the main reactor building for a very long time long term there has been a debate for decades about what to do with nuclear waste in the U.S by law the department of energy is responsible to accept and handle the nation's spent nuclear fuel this has been the on-again off-again argument around Yucca Mountain up until 2013 the department of energy was collecting around 750 million dollars per year which had accumulated into almost 45 billion dollars in its nuclear waste fund before a lawsuit ended the fees essentially political fighting made it impossible to make any progress on a permanent solution so nothing got done this left the individual nuclear plant sites with an increasing amount of spent nuclear fuel that the federal government was supposed to take since many of these plants were only designed to hold 20 years worth of fuel the pools were slowly filling up and running out of space not seeing a solution coming anytime soon the plant started removing some of the spent fuel from the pools of water and placing them into large dry metal and concrete casts that are stored outside the plant these dry casts are cooled Naturally by the air instead of water pumps like in the spent fuel pool and because the concrete and metal are much denser than water these provide the necessary radiation shielding so much so that it is possible to stand right next to them without any danger by moving the used nuclear fuel out of the pools the dry casts free up more space face in the pools for the plants to keep operating while providing a simple solution because they're air cooled they don't require electricity for pumps or heat exchangers making them more reliable in the event that power is lost and because they don't have any moving Parts maintenance is essentially just checking the Integrity of the concrete and metal that's why dry storage systems like this are designed to last for about a hundred years with almost no human upkeep needed the San onofre plant which operated continuously from 1968 to 2012 removed all of its spent Fuel and stored it on site while the plant undergoes decommissioning nearly 50 years of fuel is contained entirely here in these casks next to the plant and this is a common practice across the industry storing spent nuclear fuel at the same sites that produced it in the US there are nearly 100 of these dry storage spent fuel sites across the country and don't think that this type of storage is any less secure than keeping it in a building to demonstrate it could survive an impact from an aircraft the company holtec went to the US Army's Proving Grounds in Aberdeen Maryland and fired a missile at their Cask it survived with no breach of its Integrity but even if they are robust enough to survive shocks and last a hundred years dry storage is a temporary solution for something that needs to be managed for thousands of years and this is where we get into the slightly more political and Technical debate of what do we really do with all this waste in the long term the first thing to recognize is that the total amount of waste we're talking about here really isn't all that much at least not compared to the amount of energy we've gotten out of nuclear power plant operations one of the positive things about nuclear energy is its density and that means the total waste produced from over 70 years of operating nuclear plants in the U.S reasonably fits under a football field that's the whole volume of waste we're talking about here of course it's not practical to move all of that spent fuel around all at once and that's why specialized transport casts were developed to move the spent nuclear fuel from one place to another this does happen for various reasons and over the last 60 years more than 2500 cast shipments occurred in the U.S and close to 50 000 shipments around the world with no recorded incidence of radiation release and if you think transporting nuclear waste is dangerous that's a fair point we've already talked about how it could be lethal if it was released into the environment but again there have been no accidents of radiation release while transporting used fuel one look at the testing done on the transport casks and it's no surprise these things are built like a tank well actually tanks wish they were built like transport casks in 1978 Sandia National Labs in the southwest U.S went full mythbuster style and conducted test to demonstrate just how robust these things are one of those tests included crashing a truck powered by literal Rockets carrying a cask into a solid concrete wall at 60 miles an hour or 100 kilometers an hour the cast took so little damage that because why not they put it on another rocket truck and crashed it into the wall a second time even harder at 84 miles an hour or 135 kilometers an hour it completely survived in another test a truck was set across a railroad track where it was struck broadside by a rocket-powered train going 81 miles an hour or 130 kilometers an hour again the cast survived intact with minimal damage another test used a rail car to crash a cask into a concrete wall at 81 miles an hour or 130 kilometers an hour but after surviving that The Cask and the rail car were put over a pool of jet fuel and burned in the Flames for 90 minutes the results showed that the internal temperatures were not even close to being hot enough to melt the fuel and the spent fuel inside would have been protected even through the combination of the crash and the burn so I think it is fair to say we have safely figured out how to transport nuclear waste as far as what we do with spent nuclear fuel there are a few options the first is to accept that the spent fuel is done and ready to be disposed of the overwhelming scientific consensus on this is that putting the waste into deep geological formations that are expected to be stable for millions of years is appropriate there are a few different options but the spend fuel can be converted into a stable solid like glass encased in a container and buried into the bedrocker Underground Salt Finland has been the leader of this at its encalo facility here a large network of underground tunnels has already been dug deep into the granite rock then a series of vertical shafts will create space for canisters containing the spent fuel as each section fills up it is then back filled with clay the entire process is largely done remotely further reducing the risk of any Personnel contamination because the area is so stable and there's essentially no geological movement canisters in this kind of rock and Clay formation are expected to last Almost indefinitely even if groundwater becomes present if the canisters eventually succumb to corrosion many thousands of years into the future or longer it will still take many thousands more years for any radioactive particles to migrate far enough away from the site for each whoever might be outside and by that time the radioactivity will have decayed so low that it will be undetectable compared to naturally occurring background radiation anyway this is why these types of deep Bedrock disposal sites have the scientific consensus as a safe way to dispose of nuclear fuel another alternative to this type of geological disposal is instead of digging a series of tunnels like you'd see in a mine to instead drill very deep narrow Wells called boreholes These are typically used by the oil and gas industry for exploring or reaching pockets of fossil fuels however that same technology can be used to dig long channels that can be then used to send nuclear waste down before backfilling the advantage these have over the traditional repository is that it's possible to go much much deeper down to around 5000 meters or about 10 times as far this means the waste can be placed below any potential water sources that may come in the future and into extremely stable rock that will never see the surface probably for millions of years and by that time the waste will have decayed away into nothing a current leader in this approach has been a company called Deep isolation they claim that each section of their deep bore Wells can hold up to 10 years worth of waste from a typical nuclear reactor and considering the overall effort of drilling small sections is much less than mining an area large enough to fit a truck the cost should be more competitive too however if we don't want to directly throw away used nuclear fuel there are alternatives to burying it in the ground most of the material in used nuclear fuel can actually be recycled in fact about 97 percent of the material and spent fuel could be extracted and used again in other reactors countries like France India and Russia all practice some amount of this recycling the focus has mostly been on extracting uranium and plutonium from the spent fuel since these materials can be used in conventional reactors the fission products that are the most radioactive parts of the spent fuel are separated out this has the added benefit of greatly reducing the volume of waste it is these separated waste products that could then be suitably disposed of in the geologic repository rather than throwing out the other 97 percent of the material with it the largest of these facilities is in La HAC France which has operated for decades and possesses about half of the world's spent fuel recycling capacity the reprocessed fuel is then sent out to be used again while the concentrated waste products are stored on site another option for spent nuclear fuel that has been demonstrated albeit only on a small scale is to use it directly in a different type of reactor While most nuclear plants are operated using water around the fuel it's possible to design special reactors that use other materials like liquid sodium lead or salt when these type of reactors are fueled they can take not only enriched uranium like most reactors but other materials like thorium or even spent nuclear fuel from other reactors because these types of special reactors are much more efficient these designs can reuse our existing spent fuel for hundreds if not thousands of years one of the largest and best examples of this is the Russian bn800 fast reactor which entered commercial operation in 2020 it uses sodium as the coolant and operates initially with an enriched uranium core it was originally intended to consume plutonium from old nuclear weapons but could be loaded with spent nuclear fuel from traditional reactors in the future this approach further reduces the waste and is one of the most efficient ways of destroying existing fuel that would otherwise need to be thrown away the interesting thing is that although all these options exist and have been demonstrated the answers vary widely by country Finland has led the efforts for long-term GL logical storage with Sweden France and Belgium at various levels of study for their own finland's posseva estimates that the total cost of building its disposal facility will be 3.3 billion dollars which on its own sounds like a lot but what are we getting for that if we break it down that means storing spent nuclear fuel will cost around 600 per kilogram which adds less than 0.002 dollars or 0.2 cents per kilowatt hour a typical household will pay anywhere from 10 to 25 cents per kilowatt hour meaning the cost of a used fuel disposal accounts for only about one percent of the bill not exactly the crushing economic burden you might have thought in the United States there is a small pilot facility for Waste storage deep in New Mexico called the waste isolation pilot project but it is only for waste from the nuclear weapons program meaning commercial nuclear plants still have to rely on dry storage at each site because this is a temporary solution waste can be stored for around two hundred dollars per kilogram But ultimately we still need to do something with it so this is more of an an additional cost rather than a savings for recycling France India and Russia all perform reprocessing of spent nuclear Fuel and China is working on their own capabilities with help from the French reprocessing fuel is much more expensive than geological storage coming in at around twenty three hundred dollars per kilogram plus an additional 200 per kilogram for storing the waste left over from recycling the US has generally stayed away from reprocessing Mostly for political reasons one of the steps in reprocessing is separating out plutonium which is a key element needed to create nuclear bombs so in 1977 the US government halted all commercial reprocessing in the country as part of its stance against nuclear weapons proliferation since then there have been a few attempts to change this policy but with limited success it doesn't look like it will change anytime soon and as we've seen with Yucca Mountain a solution for long-term geological storage in the U.S is also looking unlikely previous proposals were challenged because the requirements were not set to demonstrate the site was suitable for extreme really long times like a million years while there's no way to predict exactly how the world is going to be in a hundred thousand years that doesn't mean the solution is to stop entirely or do nothing however the solutions we have for nuclear waste are very very well understood using nuclear energy is a known and effective way to reduce carbon Emissions on a large reliable scale and if you'd like to show off your support for nuclear energy you can pick up and everything happens for a reason mug by doing so you directly support this Channel and have something pretty cool to show off to your colleagues so what do you think is the nuclear waste problem solved or are there still too many unknowns let me know down in the comments below I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you in the next one foreign

Channel: AtomicBlender

Views: 88,565

Keywords: nuclear energy, nuclear power, nuclear waste, yucca mountain, reporcessing, thorium, fast reactors, san onofre, diablo canyon, nuclear

Id: WBQyiluLPFw

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 23 2023