Pass this hunk of salt around so you can see it
when you get it. Look up at a light and see the square bubbles. They are crystallographically
trapped 270 million year old seawater, and we have extracted DNA and other
biologicals from it. The DNA is viable. So this is Permian Park kind of neat stuff.
This is hailing the bacteria, no big deal, but it's a testament to how good this rock is in
isolating anything in it from the environment. I'll send it around now. Jim do you want to take
it? All right. But hold it up to the light and see the little crystallographically trapped
270 million year old seawater. All right. So with that in mind, there are four categories of
nuclear waste in the United States. Different than Europe and a lot of the other parts of
the world because we have so much bomb waste. This is spent nuclear fuel. You all recognize
that. That's what we worry about most. There's the Hanford tank waste. The high level waste. High
level waste is only bomb waste. All right. It's only comes from the first two processing steps in
making a bomb. So we happen to have a lot of that. What's interesting is that most
of that is no longer high level. 00;01;17;15 - 00;01;41;23
Unknown Then we have transuranic waste. The other type
of bomb waste. It's stuff that comes from the following three process steps during the making
of a bomb. So it's just where it comes from, not what it is. Then we have a lot of low level
waste, which is mainly dirt and other junk, but does not require deep geologic
disposal. So the first three: spent nuclear fuel, high level
waste and transuranic waste require deep geologic disposal by law. You must
use deep geologic disposal. And so when you talk about high level waste in two ways, again, they're
both bomb waste. So when you when you have a weapons reactor not in power reactor, because it
won't work with a power reactor, but a weapons reactor like we had up in Hanford, like
Russia and and a few others around the world. You take your spent fuel out of the reactor.
Within six months, it cannot stay in the reactor more than six months. So you start breeding in
neutron poisons like plutonium-240 and Pu-242 that you cannot separate from Pu-239, so your
bomb will be a dud and you do not want your bomb to be a dud. If you ever try to use a nuclear
weapon and it's a dud: Bad! It's good to know. So, so anyway, so when you take it out
of the weapons reactor within six months and you subject it to, this processing in order
to remove the plutonium and recover and purify uranium as well. This is it. So the first two
steps, this is where the high level waste goes into those tanks. 177 single shell tanks in
Hanford, most of them are high level waste. Some are TRU waste. So over the next three steps,
it goes into the transuranic waste, which is about 20 of these and about 155 of those. Okay. Now, the
funny thing, that’s happened in the last 50 years is that the high level waste is no longer high
level. We took out about half of the cesium and strontium from those tanks in the eighties, and
the others have been through 1 to 2 decay lives. 00;03;25;02 - 00;03;59;16
Unknown So there is nothing in the high level waste tanks
that is high level anymore at Hanford! None. Not a drop. Nothing exceeds 1 curie per liter. And
the greater the Class C cut off is 4 curve per liter for cesium-137 and seven curie per liter for
strontium-90. It's the fission products that make everything hot. Okay. So that being said, just
about the day I was born, 1957, National Academy of Sciences came out with a very nice report
that the Atomic Energy Commission had asked them. They said, you know, Shippingport
is just starting up. We made a lot of bomb waste. We got a lot of this
junk it is weird. Not much of it, but it's weird. What should we do with it?
Now, Academy of Sciences said, put it in, salt. The nice thing about salt is that
it creeps closed. It's a hard rock. I'm sorry. It's a soft rock. But if I threw
that at your head, it would hurt. Okay, but it's a soft rock geologically, so
under pressure, under 150 bar pressure of a half mile depth, it will creep closed.
So that unit will not sustain an opening, a fracture of a room. And you cut a room.
It will not sustain an opening period. It will collapse. It's nature's great
trash compactor. It's kind of funny and it works well. Also, the mining industry, which
started in Carlsbad, German miners in the 1880s, mining for potassium chloride, they knew exactly
how to cut with WIPP. In fact DOE came they’ve been kicked out of places, you know, as usual
and Carlsbad comes up way we we'll take it. And we said, what? And they said, Oh, yeah, we
know how to do this piece cake. And it was a piece of cake. It is a piece of cake from a mining
perspective. So it takes a billion years for water to move an inch in this rock. That's an upper
limit. Those are the kind of measurements I do. But then things changed. Things changed
in the in the seventies. EPA was formed. They established these four categories.
First for nuclear waste. And then we did this weird thing. You know, again, we we're
not going to reprocess or anything. And so someone had the ear of Jim Schlesinger,
who was the first secretary of energy, his great economist, who was not a
scientist but was a great economist. And they said, we might change our minds.
We want to get this back out in 50 years if we change our minds. Well, of course
you stop someone on the street and say we're going to get this back. I want to spend
billions of dollars putting it a half mile below the earth in something that's going
to last a million years or so or more. But we might change your mind and get it back
out. So the would say: Are you nuts? You don't throw it away. So that's that's the big issue.
But we decided we're going to throw it away and we want to get it back out. So it's kind of
like a revolving door at a department store which is incompatible with
permanent geologic disposal. So salts out. The salt is permanent,
creeps closed relatively fast. So we're going to go to a hard rock because the
hard rock will stay open for 50 years. So that's why we went to hard rock. Not a good idea.
However TRU waste is kind of a weird thing that nobody knew what it was about. It silently
kept on and went into the salt as it should be. Since then, a lot has happened. Again, most of the high level waste is not
high level waste, which is interesting. So that begs the question: Why are we vitrified
it? If it is not high level waste? Expensive. Make it expensive, right? Great job
program. Excellent jobs program. I love it. But the state requires they decided
glass was best because France does glass. And of course we must we must echo France, even
though it's not warranted. So, 1957, onward to the seventies. Now, there were 17 candidate sites
for a high level nuclear fuel repository. They were supposed to be two sites, two repositories,
because, of course, when you split the risk, the risk goes down right. This is the best
statisticians in Congress came up with that. So was that political risk? Maybe between two they
could get one. Yes. Right. So they said, okay, east, we're going to do the east and north of the
south and west. So we'll split it and everyone will be happy. All right. Well, there's not
enough waste to justify two repositories anyway. And of course, when you split it and you put it
in the wrong rock, your risk goes up quite a bit. So then by 1982, the Nuclear Waste
Policy Act came into being and they had narrowed the sites to three. Right?
And one was Yucca mountain, Nevada. You all recognize that? Hanford, Washington,
where I'm at. And Deaf Smith County, Texas. Okay. Who was speaker of the House in 1987? Yes.
Got Jim Wright from Texas. Well, Texas was out. Who was House Majority Leader Tom Foley. Tom
Foley. I like him in general. But yeah. From Hanford, Washington. So there was this new junior
just elected named Harry Reid and they said, Harry, it's yours. I'm not kidding.
I'm not kidding. That was the decision, period. Right now, they kind of missed it.
Missed the point because Harry Reid was a boxer. Did you know that? Reid was a professional
boxer? And then he headed the Nevada Gaming Commission and drove out the mobs. So he
was not a lightweight. He was tough. And of course, he became majority leader,
ironically. He basically told Obama, if you want my help in the Senate,
you're going to kill Yucca Mountain. And that's okay. Because Yucca Mountain
is a lousy place and I'll get into why. So 2009, Yucca mountain was halted. He created
the Blue Ribbon Commission to take its place. A great commission. I don't want to go into
that in detail, but if anyone does later, let me know. ...went on to develop a
new strategy. $1,000,000,000 later. Yeah. Now, never say because it's not true.
Never say that we wasted $12 billion on Yucca Mountain because only 12, actually.
So $12 billion? No, because 10 billion of that good information that we'll use anywhere.
Corrosion studies, transportation, I mean, all of it is transferable except about 2 billion over
30 years, which is it's not even one B-1 bomber. So that’s nothing to get excited about.
Yucca mountain is a highly fractured oxidizing variably saturated dual porosity
hydrologic system that sits on the edge of the Las Vegas Shear Zone. Now, which of
those words inspires confidence? Okay. It's not. It's a terrible rock and it's a horrible
rock. In fact, the rock does nothing for you. There's absolutely nothing for you. And
the whole point of deep geologic disposal is to pick a rock that does everything for
you. All you have to do is meet department transportation requirements to get it there.
This doesn't do that. So we had to come up with seven engineered barriers to re-engineer
around the fact that we picked the wrong rock. That was one of my... I'm a barrier guy. Really proud of the work we did. Wonderful
stuff. Great science, wrong rock. So, unknown to most, transuranic waste (bomb
waste) continued on into the salt as planned. And WIPP has been a brilliant success. If you want
to talk more later about the little leak they had, it wasn’t really a leak. No one was
contaminated. The equivalent of 100 smoke detectors was released into a community that
has 10,000 smoke detectors all the time. Not a big deal. Now, WIPP is built and designed for
everything. Remember that? It was built and designed for everything. It was only permitted
later for transuranic waste. So it was just a political, bureaucratic decision that said
only defense transuranic waste could go there. 1992, 16 square miles was set aside by the
Land Withdrawal Act, and when WIPP is done, it'll be immediately, maybe one or two square
miles, plenty of room for everything else. Now, this is what it looks like. There are four
shafts into the underground air intake air exit. Salt handling and waste handling. Then
there are horizontal corridors called drifts. This is mining technology and each one
of these is a panel. And each panel has seven rooms. Each room is a football field
in length. Right. It's only 30 feet wide and 13 feet high to accommodate the packages.
Right now we are almost full. The original mission of WIPP is almost done. It is ten years
ahead of schedule and $1,000,000,000 under budget. Now tell me what federal program is ahead of
schedule and under budget by even a dollar? None. Okay. Because it's the right rock. The
right rock. I'm a geologist. It's all about the rock. Right? You choose the right rocks.
Easy, simple, cheap. You use the wrong rock. Very bad takes forever. And you never have
enough money. Now, why is this rock there? Well, that rock. I'm sending
around, everyone has seen it, right? Almost everyone. Okay. So during the Permian
time, the western edge of the proto-Pacific was off the coast of Yukon, Arizona. There was
a little a bunch of fingers of the Pacific that came up into south east New Mexico, west
Texas. And because of tectonic reasons, it kept getting shut off and then it would
evaporate and then tectonics would flow again. It flowed very slow, blah, blah, blah. 30 million
years of depositing salt, 6000 feet of salt, of which the top 2000 like that, that it
passed aroun. It is pure. It's wonderful. You can actually make Marguerita salt out of it.
It's actually I did that for the BRC. General Scowcroft thought that was the funniest thing
you'd ever seen. Alison McFarland was not pleased. So I wasn't serious enough. If you look into the
light and you see little square bubbles in there, there was a fluid inclusions,
crystallographically trapped, 270 million year old seawater.
And from that we have isolated DNA. It's viable. Bacterial husks. Cellulosics
from degraded cell walls, things like that. It's only halophellic bacteria because as
this thing was evaporating, it became briny. And the only thing they can live in brine
are brine shrimp and halophellic bacteria. So nothing much happened in the last 200
million years to halophellic bacteria, they're still the same. But this is a testament
to how isolating this rock is. Biomolecules don't last that long. Generally they are
thermallitically split or degraded because the rocks get buried deep enough, so they go
up above 41 degrees C and the reason you don't want to go above 41 degrees C if you have a fever,
everyone gets really excited when you get to 105 because at 109 your DNA begins to unwind and
your enzymes begin to unwind at 109 degrees Fahrenheit. So they really like that when
you get close to that. So same thing here. So this rock was never buried deep enough to
go above that temperature. Radiolitically, this is pure salt. There's no NORM in it.
There's no naturally occurring radioactive material. There's no uranium, thorium or anything
else in it. So there's nothing to degrade this over time, and that's why it's still there. So, again, an excellent testament to
the isolating powers of this rock, because it's geologically a soft rock. No
blasting no one ever gets hurt. And you just have these these Marriot continuous miners with
tungsten carbide, tungsten carbide fingers. We just drill this out. It goes up the salt mining
shaft, gets dumped outside the repository. Here's what it looks like. That is pure salt. The lighting's weird, it looks dark, but
it's pure salt. And that's Wendell Weart. You remember Wendell? The father of
WIPP. This began operation in 1999. But it started taking high activity waste. Now
this is waste. It's up to 23 curie per liter and there is no high level waste left
at Hanford over one Curie per liter. So this is hot. Okay. And the 13 to 23 core four
liter cutoff was to handle the reprocessed waste, right? That's why we chose that number. And
this is a 72 B cask. It's just what you would haul any high level waste or spent fuel bundle
or a military grade material in. So the hot stuff gets moved around in this highly shielded
transport cask down into the underground and then gets robotically plunged into a robotically
cut 14 foot deep borehole and then it gets robotically shoved in there and then gets plugged
with a four foot metal wrapped cement plug. It's really quite neat. And when you do that
and all the walls with the hot waste, then you go back in and fill the rest of the waste with
the it's not low level, it's transuranic waste. So is it mainly plutonium, americium, uranium,
neptunium and stuff like that. It's the actinides. And so this is what it looks like. So if I took you down there and I used to take
people down there, Jim Clyburn came down there, bunch of others, and they’re standing and looking
at it and go: God, this is great! Why aren't we doing this for everything? And I said, Well,
that's your job. So anyway, so this guy here is standing in front of the easily shielded alpha
and beta, and the hot stuff is behind him and he's standing there getting 1 tenth of the dose that
we're all getting here right now. 1/10 the dose. And he's standing in front of nuclear waste,
including relatively high activity. And that's because, of course, it's a half mile below
the earth. So most of the cosmic rays are shielded out. It's easy to shield this
stuff. There's no NORM. It's all pure salt. So there's no uranium around him.
So, yeah, he's getting a tenth we are. In fact, the biggest dose he's getting
is from the potato chips for lunch. So again, when working for 23 years,
but 150,000 cubic meters, about 700,000, 55 gallon drum equivalents, all you
have to do is put the waste into a container that fits in the shipping
container. You have to meet department transportation requirements. That's it,
right? You canister doesn't have to last. At Yucca Mountain the canister has to last. So we
got super copper canisters and have to have the vitrified the waste because the rock does nothing
for you. 22 storage sites are clean. Rocky Flats is in WIPP. It's just kind of funny. One minor released and it was quite minor and DOE
freaked out, and the state freaked out. We had a plan to clean it up in three months
at $30 million and it took three years and $500 million. Unnecessary. But that's okay.
It's right. So here's what it looks like. EPA requires one engineer barrier. They
don't believe the earth is good enough, so they require one engineer barrier.
So we came up with powdered MgO. It absorbs Plutonium, it absorbs CO2, absorbs
water. Really great stuff. It forms a soil cement. So this is in powdered bags, these
side bags we we got rid of before we actually started to dispose of anything. But when the
ceiling comes down and the walls come in, it breaks those sacs on top and it falls
around it. It's actually kind of neat. It's cheap. Very cheap. So this is what happens
in 10 to 15 years. It is closing and it's back to what it was before, well over a thousand years.
But it's amazing. So if you know anything about the properties, you know, flow properties,
diffusion coefficient, hydraulic connectivity, these are very low numbers. Okay. Very hard
to measure actually, when they're this low. In fact, the diffusion coefficient is pretty much the crystalline
diffusion coefficient of hydrogen. Now it's the properties of the rock that matter.
It's all about the rock. So porosity and it's mainly these unconnected square fluid inclusions.
The pH is ideal. It's the minimum transport for plutonium and water. The EH is perfect. It's
the most reducing groundwater in America. And you want it reducing because then nothing
moves. Plutonium doesn't move, uranium doesn't move. Technicium doesn't move. It doesn't move.
If it's reducing. Now, the thermal conductivity is about five times that of the tough, so
you can load it up with p a lot higher than any else. And this annealing, this creep closure
works at least the sixth part of the temperature. So it works better the hotter the waste. Again, you cannot manufacture a rock this
good. So what you're given is essentially a 200 million year design life. Performance
life. At Yucca Mountain we had to struggle for 10,000 years and then they raised it to 100,000
years and we said: We can't do that. It's not going to happen. But yeah, so you’re just given it
by this rock. 200 million years, so you don't need engineered barriers, although we have to have one
by law, you know, the waste form is irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether it's glass grout junk, as long as the department of transportation
requirements require less than 1% free liquid. So as long as it's dry, it's good.
It doesn't matter what it is. You don't need the cladding to persist, only the canister to
persist. No adverse temperature effects and the fluid inclusion migration is irrelevant. Although
you will hear from the Germans that it matters. It's because their salt sucks. It's all about the
salt. Excuse me. That was not called for. So the way to solve this is a 16 square mile set aside
by the Land Withdrawal Act and WIPP, still, again, ten years ahead of schedule. Boom. Under budget.
And there's the footprint of the original mission. Now, if you want to put,
say, high level waste there. And put spent fuel in interim storage
nearby, this is what your footprint is. Then if you decide to put spent
nuclear fuel in there and you are supplying 40% of our energy needs by the
year 2100, this is all the space you need. Now, I should say the 16 square mile set
aside was just an arbitrary number. There's 10,000 square miles of this unit. All
right? 10,000 square miles. We only need 16. Interm storage is great. The canisters work for
about 160 years at least. And if something happens to a canister you put into a new canister. This
is not rocket science. And again, you're going to use this waste hopefully in something fast
reactors. You're going to recycle whatever Curio is a perfect segway for this. And then there's
Deep Borehole. You've heard of Deep borehole. Took me a while to come around, but I like
it. And one reason I like it is it gets all the congressional delegations really upset.
Why do you think that? You can do it in any state. So suddenly, you know, New York can
have it. But if you're if you're three miles, you know, four or five kilometers into the crust,
there is no mechanism to get it back out unless it goes through, you know, plate tectonics,
cycling, and that's millions of miles of year. So there's no way to get this back out. So it
doesn't matter where you put it the country. As long as you avoid a magma chamber. Okay. So
every state that has nuclear waste can have its own deep borehole disposal. And they
have been crying for decades that no, no, this is going to leave the state
it needs to go someplace else. So this got them upset, but
it is brilliant. However, the waste package matters because if you're
going to put down whole fuel assemblies, that's a tough drill for five kilometers. But
it's not if it's a foot. So this is really where advanced reactor waste is perfect because you
can pick your shape of your container, right? You can put molten-salt waste. You can
put fast reactor waste. Doesn't matter. You can make your packages tall and thin
and then you don't spend so much drilling a five kilometer hole. Now you've heard of
Deep Isolation out of Berkeley. They put a little curve thing in here. They put a
plumber's trap. This great, I love it. It’s a plumber’s trap, which
is brilliant. Because again, the only way out is the borehole. But of course,
if you see a ball decently for five kilometers, there's no way they could get it out. But, you
know, this is great. So things will never get out of that hole. We have talking drill rigs now, you
know that? I should have a picture of one here. We have walkie drill rigs. When you're finished
fracking and drilling, it picks itself up and it walks to the next site. I love it from
science fiction, but it's horrible from an environmental standpoint because it's too
easy to get oil and gas out of the ground. Now, in each one of these walking drill rigs
can go, you know, 18,000 feet. It can have 12 stringers off a single well. It's just too easy to
get fossil fuel out of the ground now. And so to say, we're going to stop that without something to
take its place like nuclear... is insane. I mean, it's like putting a, you know, two bowls in
front of children, one's apples and one's candy. And you say, I leave the room now,
but you can only eat the apples. Nope, its too easy to get fossil fuel out of the
ground. This is a deep boreholes test hole that they did work perfectly. But notice it's tall
and thin. Perfect for the cesium capsules up at Hanford or for this. But WIPP’s good for
everything. So that's another thing so it mean I don't want to spend you know more about
this than I do but I mean the pebble's great. You know, the new ANEEL fuel, great. It's much
smaller than a traditional fuel bundle. But yeah, anything you can get to a tall and thin
shape is ideal for borehole disposal. Again, you just have to satisfy Department
of Transportation requirements, either the 72B cask or the TRU pack two or
three cask. And you just get it down there. It doesn't matter how you get
it there. As long as you meet Department of Transportation requirements.
So there's only a few possible outcomes for our nuclear waste disposal program. I hate to
say it because only a couple of things. One, TRU it continues on into WIPP which is
permitted in licensed for transuranic waste so all the TRU waste we have goes there,
but WIPP is only permitted for defense waste. If you start making TRU from Curio
you have to change the permit. How difficult is that? Yeah, it
could be a mess. But you know, I like to say when human law comes up against
natural law, who wins? Okay, now, otherwise we would outlaw volcanoes and tornadoes and stuff. So
defense waste, so transuraniuc high level waste. If you redefine high level waste that’s
transuranic and low level as it actually is, we're working on that. Finally get some headway.
Then transuranic goes to WIPP. The high level waste goes to one of the four repositories
of America. We have for low level waste. Commercial waste, you put an interim
storage so we get our act together. Then you either burn it in new reactors,
Curio’s right there. And then that waste goes either into WIPP if you expand WIPP’s
mission, or it goes to the deep borehole, or you can have a second salt repository.
Because we have a lot of salt. A lot of salt. A lot of good salt.
Better than the rest of the world. Don't put it in domal salt because domes are
moving. All right? Domes of die and appear. They have vertical spline fractures
that leak meteoric water into them. Any questions? What's holding up the WIPP
from taking SNF. Oh, the state of New Mexico of course. Repeat the question for the internet.
What is holding up WIPP from expanding to take all waste like it was originally designed?
It's the state of New Mexico and interests like the oil industry and things like
that. Oh it will destroy the oil industry. No it won’t. It has nothing to do with
it. Will not interfere at all. Oil is at 10 to 18000 feet and WIPP is at
2000 feet. There really is no real problem. But every time we talk
about expanding WIPP’s mission, everyone in New Mexico cries, oh, you lied
to us. It's like, no, we didn't lie to you. You changed it. We didn't. It was supposed
to be everything. It was supposed to be all nuclear waste of any type. WIPP was
designed and built for that. And you said just just transuranic. How hard would
it be to get a Alberta politician through The WIPP? Like if they were going to actually
get someone, oh, yeah. Oh, you're a foreigner. 45 days, you know, the usual. I'm a retired senior reactor operator.
What you think about sub-seabed disposal? Sub-seabed is the best way to do it.
You don't even have to drill a well. You just go to a trench.
Which are thousands of feet deep. There's thousands of feet of muck, highly
reducing, highly soft, very impermeable to water. And you just drop your your package down.
We even designed it so that we could use the the penetrators we developed for Vietnam. It just
goes down and it's gone forever. Dragged into the into the mantle. Brilliant. Perfect.
Cheap. Easy... but international waters. That's it. Just say that it's
over. So revaluation 2025. Yeah. What the seabed. Yeah, but it's the same thing.
International waters. Oh, you'll have an Exxon Valdez guy that will run into the Philippines.
Yeah, but it is the best. The best method, without question. What are the interests of
foreign nations or what we represent with that. Oh, you can't well blow them
out of the water? I dunno. But you know, you really can't. But they won't.
They won't. See, the thing is, we have more waste than anyone else, right? I'm not sure what
Russia does with some of theirs, but. They put it in the Arctic. Yeah, yeah. They kind of
do that. No, most nations don't have enough. I mean, there's there's France, there's Japan,
there's us, there’s Russia and then maybe England. But all the rest don't have enough reactors to
really warrant a lot of activity. So there are 14 nations that have got together to form the
Aureus Group in Europe that only have a few reactors. And they said, okay, we're going to
work on one repository for the 14 countries and that's as close as you're going to get to that
kind of thing, which is actually quite good. First thing that came to mind is... Is
the opposition to using WIPP for spent nuclear fuel more so on a local level,
not in my backyard kind of deal? Oh God, no. The farther away you are from it, the more
you hate it. So everyone around WIPP loves it. And because WIPP has been so successful,
it's, you know, this is a mining community. Mining is dangerous. People die. No one's
ever died at WIPP because DOE doesn’t try make money on it. Okay. So you have good air. If
you're a miner you know what that means. 425,000 cubic feet per minute of airflow. It's like, my God, in the commercial mines,
you don't get anywhere near that. Sometimes it's the air quality is terrible and
you have to ride with the back of the ceiling right over your head. You're driving like this.
Whereas WIPP is beautiful. You mentioned that as long as you're using the DoT approved
transportation, it'd be all right. I've heard in the past that that's one of the big
showstoppers of a central... It’s transportation, I know we've never had a problem with
transportation. We have put this stuff over millions and millions of miles
of road. Never had a problem. People even know what's going through
it. Usually. So transportation isn't a problem. Okay. Oh, yes. Okay, perfect.
So, yeah, perfect safety record. Just it's just. But is there a way, like politically,
if you start by going across state lines? Yes. See, the thing is, the feds control RAD.
The feds control radiological material. The states have no say in it at all. Okay. That's
why the first shipment WIPP was all RAD and no RECRA The states have control over RECRA,
which is, you know, toxic chemicals like lead and mercury and dioxin and stuff. They
have to issue a permit to get on the road. So DOE’s always worried about, you know, making
the states mad because they'll pull their permit. But in the end, if anyone has a:
What about the waste? You say: Piece of cake.
We know what to do with it. We're already doing it with a lot of waste. We
know where to put it. We know how much it costs. We're just not allowed to do it. And one more short, short one here. Just wondering
if you could briefly comments on the geology of our Oncolo facility at our Canadian Sites’s
earth Yeah, they're all good sites. I mean, they're deep enough in the crust and they're
in tight, you know, granitic material. And it's not as good as salt, but, you know, it
doesn't have to be perfect kind of thing. Yeah, and they're good and there's not a lot
of waste. Absolutely. So and spent fuel is easy because spent fuel is not leaky. Not like the junk
in the tanks at Hanford. You leak a lot of crap. I'm surprised they're not all leaking. The
design life of those tanks was 15 years. I mean, what were you going to do with a million
gallons of high level waste after 15 years? So yeah, I'm just surprised. And all, almost
all the ones leaking are transatlantic waste tanks. The not the high level things. I'm just
saying. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Jim.
