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Nearly 80 years of nuclear waste in the US is currently stranded — stuck in "temporary" storage sites without a permanent place to go. How big of a problem is this? And could recycling this waste solve the problem?
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00:00Growing up, pop culture taught me that nuclear waste is green and goopy.
00:05That it's haphazardly dumped into our environment.
00:09Well, sir, where should we dump this batch?
00:11The news has told us we should fear it.
00:13A small cup of it would kill everyone in a crowded restaurant in minutes.
00:18And politicians have told us we don't know what to do with it.
00:21It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me to add more dangerous waste
00:25when we don't know how to get rid of what we have right now.
00:27But most of this isn't really true.
00:30The fuel for nuclear power plants is not actually glowing or green.
00:34It's, somewhat anticlimactically, solid gray pellets.
00:38And scientists have known the best way to permanently dispose of the most dangerous nuclear waste for more than 50 years.
00:45But not a single country in the world has been able to make it happen yet.
00:49Instead, it's in temporary storage, which poses a real risk if disaster strikes.
00:54Meanwhile, nuclear power plants provide round-the-clock electricity with zero carbon emissions.
01:00Meeting climate goals without using nuclear power would be nearly impossible.
01:04And AI and data centers are only going to put more pressure on our energy supply.
01:09So can we settle the nuclear waste issue once and for all?
01:12And is this stuff even waste? Or could it be an untapped resource?
01:16I spent months interviewing experts to find out the truth.
01:23Nuclear power provides nearly a tenth of the world's electricity.
01:26And all that comes from a relatively small number of power plants, roughly 400 of them.
01:31For comparison, it takes more than 6,000 coal plants to make about a third of the world's electricity.
01:37In fact, one small uranium fuel pellet creates about as much energy as one ton of coal.
01:44These are the fuel for nuclear reactors.
01:46To make them, enriched uranium is pressed from a powder form into cylinders and stacked up inside metal rods.
01:52Splitting the uranium's atoms apart in a process called fission releases a lot of heat.
01:57That turns the water into steam, which spins a turbine, creating electricity.
02:02When these fuel rods are freshly made, they're not all that radioactive.
02:06You could safely handle them with gloves.
02:08But after three to five years making energy inside a reactor, things change.
02:13The used rods release ionizing radiation.
02:16And that can be pretty dangerous.
02:18High doses of it can kill off cells, damage DNA, and over time cause cancer.
02:23Even getting close to used fuel rods right after they come out of a reactor could be deadly.
02:29This used fuel is categorized as high-level nuclear waste.
02:32But there are other types too.
02:34The labels vary by country, but there's also mid-level waste like reactor parts,
02:38and low-level waste which includes protective gear, gloves, coats, and tools used by workers.
02:43All these things are considered nuclear waste.
02:46But used fuel is by far the most radioactive and the hardest to deal with.
02:51The good news is that only about 5% of the waste from nuclear power plants is high-level.
02:57In fact, if you could take all the high-level waste ever created and put it together,
03:01it would fit in one football field to a height of about 10 yards.
03:06But even if the waste takes up a lot less space than most people think,
03:10we still need to manage it carefully.
03:12High-level nuclear waste can stay dangerously radioactive for thousands of years.
03:17It may seem impossible to keep something secure for that long,
03:20but we do have a pretty clear idea of what needs to be done.
03:23And we've actually known for a while.
03:26In 1957, a panel of scientists put out a report on radioactive waste that said that long-term,
03:32the best option was to dispose of it deep underground,
03:35possibly in an old salt mine or some other non-porous cavity.
03:39And they had the right idea.
03:41Since that time, every country who has seriously looked at this issue has come to the same conclusion,
03:47including up till today.
03:49Seven decades later, we still haven't made this happen.
03:53Seriously, no one has.
03:5531 countries get electricity from nuclear power plants,
03:58and not a single one has actually permanently disposed of its spent nuclear fuel underground.
04:03Instead, it's in supposedly temporary storage, mainly above ground but without a permanent place to go.
04:12This is a map of the temporary storage sites in the U.S. that hold spent fuel.
04:18Right now, about one in three Americans live within 50 miles of one.
04:22Here's how these facilities work.
04:24When fuel is spent, the bundle of rods is removed from the reactor and put into wet storage.
04:30These steel-lined pools cover the rods in about 20 feet of water.
04:34While the fuel cools down, the water is surprisingly effective at blocking radiation.
04:39Theoretically, you might even be able to go swimming at the top of one of these pools and be fine,
04:45though I don't recommend it.
04:46But if you swam to the bottom and touched the fuel, the dose of radiation would be deadly.
04:51But what about living near these storage sites?
04:54Experts I spoke to said under normal conditions, living near this type of site is perfectly safe.
04:59We are going to handle this material only in ways that protect workers who are going to be working in close proximity for long periods of time,
05:09let alone people in the public who are going to be very far away from these facilities.
05:14But if something went very wrong, like a terrorist attack or a widespread, long-lasting power outage,
05:20the pools could lose their water, which would be a big problem.
05:23So the pools come with some risk.
05:27Those pools have to be actively cooled.
05:30If you walked away from them, that water would eventually boil off,
05:36and then you would have a massive meltdown of spent fuel and massive release of radiation.
05:43There are backups to protect these pools in case of emergency.
05:47And at this point, the U.S. has done wet storage without incident since the dawn of nuclear power.
05:52But just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it never will.
05:56No matter what, we need to put used fuel into pools for about a year before it can safely be moved.
06:02But with few places to go next, waste tends to stay in these pools a lot longer.
06:07And over time, the pools have gotten more crowded, which some experts I spoke with said makes them riskier.
06:14Well, a major risk is because those pools are filled to overcapacity.
06:20Since the U.S. has pretty much jam-packed its wet storage,
06:23after about five years in the pool, the fuel rods are usually moved to dry storage.
06:28That typically means a steel container placed inside a thick concrete one,
06:32which provides so much shielding you can safely stand right next to it.
06:36The spent fuel rods basically just sit there until the industry and the government decide what to do with them.
06:41These facilities also have to be monitored, maintained, and staffed with security.
06:45Again, these casks are very secure for the near future.
06:49But we don't know exactly how long they'll last before they start to corrode.
06:53It may be a hundred years. It may be two hundred years. We don't know.
06:57Whenever they do break down, somebody, some institution, has to be responsible to move the spent fuel from those broken down casks into new fresh ones.
07:09And somebody has to pay for that.
07:11This is one of the big problems with temporary storage.
07:14Leaving a burden for future generations from energy consumed long before they were even alive.
07:19You're trusting institutions to take care of the public long into the future.
07:26And I have no faith that those institutions will exist or take on that beneficial role.
07:34Even when we shut down an old nuclear plant, the waste has nowhere to go.
07:39About 20 sites in the U.S. have been decommissioned, but still have their waste sitting there, stranded.
07:44It would be nice to turn those places back into usable locales for other things.
07:52But you can't move the spent fuel. You can take everything else out.
07:56One controversial example of this is the San Onofre Power Plant in California.
08:00It closed down in 2013, but its waste is still sitting there, nestled between a highway and a beach.
08:07Concerns about that site and others in the U.S. ratcheted up in 2011,
08:11after a catastrophic tsunami hit a nuclear site in Fukushima, Japan.
08:16The main risk here was related to three reactors that melted down after the plant lost both main and backup power.
08:22There was also a close call with spent fuel stored in pools.
08:26But fortunately, the pools didn't lose water fast enough to uncover the rods.
08:30During the crisis, workers pumped water through the reactors to cool them down, creating a huge amount of radioactive wastewater.
08:38After storing it for 12 years, the plant began gradually releasing filtered and diluted wastewater into the Pacific Ocean.
08:45This sparked huge backlash, even though the actual levels of radiation were quite low.
08:50One study found you could eat a lifetime's worth of fish caught near this area and still get about as much radiation as one dental x-ray.
08:59Nonetheless, Fukushima is a reminder that disaster can strike at nuclear plants.
09:05The more waste we have sitting around, the greater the potential risk if that site experiences a natural disaster or terror attack.
09:13A deep geological repository could help address a lot of these problems, and it wouldn't require active maintenance.
09:19Bury the waste in a deep hole might sound simple, but in practice there's a lot to it.
09:25It has to be geologically stable.
09:27The rocks should be impermeable, meaning things don't tend to seep in or out.
09:30It can't be in a very sensitive ecosystem.
09:32The list goes on.
09:34The country that's the closest to actually getting it done right now is Finland.
09:38Since 2004, Finland has been building what's poised to be the world's first deep geological repository for nuclear waste, aiming to be an example for the whole world.
09:52The facility is called Onkalo.
09:54It's a network of tunnels drilled into 2 billion-year-old bedrock at a depth of more than 400 meters.
10:00Spent fuel moves through the tunnels on remote-controlled vehicles.
10:04The machine drills a hole for each canister, and each hole is lined with bentonite clay.
10:09When this clay comes into contact with water, it expands to form a tight seal,
10:13which one, helps slow water flow around the container, and two, helps keep it from shifting around inside the rock.
10:19The horizontal tunnel above the holes is also backfilled with clay and then topped off with a concrete plug.
10:26The whole thing uses the multiple-barrier concept.
10:29You have secure containers, clay, and the bedrock itself providing layers of protection.
10:34Importantly, most of the process can be done by remote control, minimizing workers' exposure to radioactive waste.
10:41After about 100 years, Onkalo will be full.
10:45At that point, the whole thing will be backfilled and sealed with concrete, and all the structures on top will be taken down.
10:51Selecting this location took about 20 years.
10:54And part of the reason it was picked is that people who live nearby largely support it.
10:59Nuclear waste poses serious risks if handled improperly,
11:03and the community has to trust that the government and the companies involved are going to do it right.
11:09That was one of the fatal flaws in the US's attempt to build a nuclear waste disposal site.
11:14By the 1980s, America had been creating nuclear waste for roughly 40 years, with little regulation guiding how to dispose of it.
11:25Most nuclear power plants were storing it on site, and some were starting to run out of room.
11:30Besides that, there was also waste piling up from the research, testing, and development of nuclear weapons.
11:36According to the EPA, this process left behind more than 100 million gallons of liquid waste,
11:43which was a mix of both hazardous chemicals and radioactive materials.
11:47The idea of nuclear waste as leaky drums of goop comes in part from this Cold War-era sludge.
11:54And images like this one show that it was definitely not always carefully managed.
11:59It might have even inspired jokes like this from The Simpsons.
12:03I think it's full, sir.
12:04That's ridiculous! The last tree held nine drums!
12:07But there are important differences between nuclear weapons waste and nuclear energy waste.
12:12The legacy pollution from making atomic bombs was created during an arms race,
12:17where the priorities were speed and secrecy.
12:20The used fuel from modern nuclear power plants comes from a very different, much more regulated system.
12:26Regardless, by the 80s, we had a pileup on our hands.
12:30To address it, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982.
12:35Its goal was to create a roadmap for permanent underground disposal of high-level radioactive waste.
12:41It tasked the Department of Energy with studying ten potential sites.
12:45Then, five years later, Congress changed its mind and picked just one site to assess.
12:50A remote spot on Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
12:53You shouldn't have Congress selecting sites for nuclear waste disposal.
12:59They are not a scientific body.
13:01They are a political body.
13:03And that's when things went wrong.
13:08Nevada and Yucca Mountain already had an eventful history with nuclear technology.
13:12The U.S. government tested nuclear weapons there.
13:18A lot of them.
13:19From 1951 to 1963, about 100 atomic blasts took place at the Nevada test site.
13:29These sent radioactive particles high into the atmosphere, which fell back down to Earth, contaminating land, air, and water.
13:35A new term, fallout, the radioactive dust which descends upon the Earth after the big blasts, has occupied citizens and the press.
13:44There has been some exaggeration, says the Atomic Energy Commission.
13:47The tests do not produce dangerous fallout.
13:50Unfortunately, they very much did.
13:53The Nevada test site contains some of the most radioactive land in the world, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.
14:00It's contaminated with substances linked to thyroid cancer and birth defects.
14:05So, many Nevadans weren't thrilled to hear they'd been selected for nuclear waste disposal.
14:11Three decades later, communities were still resisting the project, and politicians were still fighting about it.
14:16Yucca Mountain is dead, and Nevada will not be our nation's nuclear waste dump.
14:21If you generate nuclear waste, you should keep it in your own backyard.
14:24Today, the Yucca Mountain repository is indefinitely paused.
14:27And experts I spoke with said there's very little chance it will move forward.
14:31Before its funding was frozen in 2011, the government had already spent a huge amount of money on the project,
14:36including boring tunnels into the rock where researchers studied the site.
14:40CBS News called it a $19 billion hole in the ground.
14:44That was taxpayer money.
14:46But to make matters worse, the federal government had also been collecting another type of payment.
14:51Starting in the early 80s, nuclear power plant operators paid a fee per unit of electricity they made,
14:57which they passed on to customers' electricity bills.
15:00Over the years, it added up to almost $50 billion.
15:04The promise was that the government would use that fund to build new systems and start taking the waste away from the plants in 1998.
15:11Which, of course, it hasn't done.
15:13The Department of Energy was still collecting about $750 million a year in 2013 when a federal court ruled it had to stop.
15:22But now this issue is costing taxpayers again.
15:25Because the government didn't fulfill its end of the deal, it's paying penalties to the nuclear industry every year it fails to take away the waste.
15:32$11 billion so far, with an estimated $44 billion in future costs.
15:38And the government is apparently not yet investigating alternative sites either.
15:43The current law of the land is that the United States has Yucca Mountain as its chosen selected disposal site.
15:51Until you make that final decision, either move forward or strike it for future consideration, everything else is jammed up.
16:00What's really interesting here is that the US actually does have a deep repository for nuclear waste.
16:05The only working one in the world.
16:07And the community actually volunteered to host it.
16:10But it doesn't take used fuel at all.
16:13Only waste from weapons production.
16:15A 1992 law specifically banned it from taking reactor fuel, which was more controversial at the time.
16:21Meanwhile, the US makes about 2,000 metric tons of used fuel each year.
16:25And with nowhere for it to go, most plants continue to store it on site.
16:29The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says nuclear plants are running out of room.
16:33And that the US now needs to add more temporary storage sites.
16:37Not so shockingly, states have fought back against hosting those facilities.
16:41Because without any plan for disposal, people are skeptical that these sites will actually be temporary.
16:47In June of this year, the Supreme Court ruled against the states, clearing the way for more temporary storage.
16:53These endless political hangups are in large part because people fear nuclear waste.
16:59But the irony here is that our current system puts more people close to it.
17:03And keeps it less secure.
17:05Meanwhile, some people argue it actually isn't waste at all.
17:08Because it's possible to reuse it.
17:10Spent rods actually still have about 90% of their energy locked inside them.
17:18And it's possible to recover some of that energy.
17:21Media coverage often calls this recycling.
17:23Although that sort of glosses over how complex this process is.
17:28First, the fuel still has to cool down in a pool.
17:31Then those rods are disassembled and sliced into smaller pieces before being dissolved in a solution of nitric acid.
17:37A series of chemical reactions separates out the useful elements from everything else.
17:42The useful end products are uranium and plutonium, which both need additional processing before they can be used again.
17:49Plutonium mixed with uranium can become something called mixed oxide or MOX fuel, which can go back into nuclear reactors.
17:56With uranium and plutonium separated out, what remains is a radioactive mixture of chemicals and metals.
18:02This is still high-level waste and needs to be managed carefully.
18:05Usually, it's vitrified, which means encased in glass, before it can head to long-term disposal.
18:11So there's still waste from this process. It's not perfectly circular.
18:15But depending on the specific reprocessing technique, it can also make the waste radioactive for less time.
18:21You can see here we could be talking about less than a thousand years, instead of the 250,000 years it takes when nuclear fuel is used only once.
18:30And of course, recovering uranium from the fuel rods means you can mine less new uranium.
18:35The problem here is that uranium is quite cheap.
18:38So going through all this effort to reuse it is actually more expensive.
18:42That's one of the big misconceptions, is that somehow if I reprocess, it's going to save me money. It's not.
18:49Some experts I spoke with said reprocessing can reduce the cost of disposal, because you end up with less waste by volume, meaning a smaller repository.
18:57But you can't save money on something if you're not doing it yet, which makes it a tough sell in the U.S.
19:02While reprocessing has a lot of attractiveness, and I would support it, without that back-end cost offset, it just doesn't make any economic sense at this point in time.
19:13Others I spoke to strongly opposed reprocessing altogether.
19:17It's getting a lot of political traction, and it shouldn't.
19:20We have plenty of uranium. There is no need to reprocess. It's a complete boondoggle.
19:27To be clear, there's lots of uranium in the Earth's crust, but it has to be enriched to be used in reactors.
19:34The U.S. doesn't do much of that, and relies mainly on imports instead.
19:39But experts I spoke with raised another concern.
19:42Reprocessing separates the plutonium out of fuel rods.
19:45It can be reused in fuel, but if it's not, having a stockpile of plutonium on hand creates a pathway to making more nuclear weapons.
19:54This concern is actually why the U.S. doesn't reuse its nuclear fuel.
19:58In 1977, the U.S. was doing some reprocessing.
20:02But President Jimmy Carter shut it down, saying we could have a viable and economic nuclear power program without it.
20:09The idea was to prevent the global spread of technology that could lead to more nuclear weapons.
20:15Today, the debate about reprocessing and nuclear weapons proliferation is still not settled.
20:20France is the world's leading nuclear waste reprocessor, and a fascinating case study.
20:25Orano, the state-owned company that processes the used fuel, is now the world's third largest producer of uranium.
20:31Although France reuses less than half of the uranium it recovers as fuel, and stockpiles the rest.
20:37And it makes use of the plutonium, transporting it 800 kilometers to the south of France, where it's turned into MOX fuel.
20:43But again, there's a catch. Even with all this effort, France is still making more plutonium than it can reuse.
20:49The country's inventory of plutonium has been growing for the last two decades.
20:54Critics of reprocessing point out that the more we lean into this technology, the more the world's supply of separated plutonium could grow.
21:01And over long periods, we don't know whether our current safeguards and institutions will remain in place.
21:06Basically, you can go back and forth on reprocessing all day.
21:11The U.S. has so much waste in storage that reprocessing it would power the entire country for a hundred years.
21:16But doing so would cost about 100 billion dollars. And so on and so on.
21:22The discourse about this tends to assume we need to settle the reprocessing question before figuring out disposal.
21:28But crucially, we don't. We need repositories for disposal either way.
21:33On that, the experts I spoke with all agreed.
21:36You see a lot of people talking about trying to do reprocessing.
21:39You know, but nobody talks about disposal.
21:42There are a number of people out there saying that this is the answer to nuclear waste.
21:48We don't need a repository. That is flat out a lie.
21:54Despite this, the Trump administration is pursuing reprocessing without making any clear plans for disposal.
22:01A new generation of startups are also showing interest in reusing nuclear fuel.
22:06A startup called Oklo recently announced plans for a reprocessing facility in Tennessee,
22:11which it says will produce fuel for its micro-reactors.
22:14Another startup, Curio, says its process can recover not only uranium and plutonium,
22:18but also valuable metals like rhodium and palladium.
22:21These technologies fall under the umbrella of advanced nuclear.
22:25A broad term that basically just means technology that's substantially different from the reactors we have today.
22:30Some companies in this space have promoted their tech by saying it won't create as much nuclear waste.
22:36But unfortunately, that isn't necessarily true.
22:39Studies have had mixed results, but most find these new designs will produce the same,
22:44or even more, waste per unit of energy as today's reactors.
22:48This problem is simply not going away.
22:51And in case you're watching this and thinking,
22:53wow, I don't like the sound of any of this.
22:55Maybe we should just stop using nuclear power altogether.
22:58Know that even that wouldn't solve this issue.
23:01When you shut down a nuclear power plant, you have to decommission it.
23:05And all that fuel plus the reactor itself becomes waste that has to be disposed of.
23:09Of course, context is key here.
23:15Every form of energy leaves solid waste behind.
23:18Burning coal produces toxic coal ash.
23:21Refining oil leaves behind sludge.
23:23Wind turbines have giant, hard to recycle fiberglass blades.
23:26And so on.
23:27This report compared various industries based on how much radioactive waste they leave behind.
23:32You can see a number of industries beat out nuclear, including coal, oil, gas, and, interestingly, water treatment.
23:41Coal ash, by the way, is also radioactive.
23:44Because coal naturally contains thorium and uranium.
23:47And when it's burned up for energy, those radioactive elements become more concentrated in the ash that's left over.
23:53All around us, the world is full of natural and unnatural sources of radiation.
23:57Like the sun, airport scanners, and x-rays and medical treatments.
24:01This report looked at the baseline dose of radiation that we all get just from walking around.
24:06And then broke it down by source.
24:08The green rectangle on top is the dose from medical sources.
24:11The red one on the bottom is background radiation from the natural environment.
24:15And these very small blocks up on top are the dose we get from nuclear waste and nuclear power.
24:22So we know the health risks of nuclear waste have been relatively well managed so far.
24:28The big question is how do we make sure that future humans can and will continue to manage the risk?
24:34Because nothing is going to save us from the need for permanent disposal.
24:38Not recycling, not shutting it all down, and not newer, more high-tech reactors.
24:43Which makes it all the more frustrating that the US government seems to have this near the bottom of its priority list.
24:48The Trump administration gutted the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board,
24:52a nonpartisan board of experts that gave advice on dealing with this waste.
24:56Even as the US and other countries declare their tripling nuclear energy by 2050.
25:02There are valid critiques of nuclear power, including its cost and the time to build it.
25:07But that's a subject for another video.
25:09For now, what's very clear is that when it comes to nuclear waste, it's time to stop kicking the can down the road.
25:15If you're curious about the sources for this video, I made a reading list for you, and it's linked in the video description below.
25:21If you're curious about this video, I'll see you in the video description below.
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