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The Real Bad Stuff (High-Level Wastes)
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- Опубликовано: 14 авг 2024
- A detailed description of what high-level radioactive wastes are and where they come from including fission products and trans-uranic elements. How much is produced and exists is explained. Why the plutonium from nuclear wastes will not work in an atomic bomb. How they are stored, where they are stored, and the safety of that storage are discussed. Yucca mountain is shown and described as well as other alternatives such as dray cask storage.
I found this series by accident. I have to say it is refreshing to see the subjects presented by an expert in a simple and clear manner without the sensationalist BS. It is a shame that it doesn't have more views.
I love science but I don’t have a technical background ⋯⋯this is one of the reason I love this professional so much
True, no place for interpretation, just facts. Advanced but shared in simple terms. Great job to the author.
My Father - in- law was the GM of the Yucca Mtn project back in the 90’s. He needed you as a spokesperson to explain it.
Don't lie.
I think its a wonderful idea for heating swimming pools cheaply
Yeah, I want 100g of Cs-137 for warm water. Why waste fossils on warm water?
As stupid as this sounds it would actually work. After like a meter of water you would be totally fine.
@@Karavusk I wouldn't put it into my bathtub. I want it in a tank in the basement.
The temperature is controlled by how well it is insulated.
@@0MoTheG You can't turn it off though, you would always have to use some water or it just gets too hot.
Yeah, swimming pools that sterilize people too......
After the Chernobyl TV series an educational series on the details of how nuclear power plants operate is incredibly necessary.
He has a couple of videos on that very subject 🖖
he did it before it was cool.
Yeah I think that’s exactly what caused this channel to boom so drastically. He’s added 6k+ subs in the last two weeks or so. This channel is great and deserves the recognition. Glad to see the algorithm doing real work
@@PhotonBread "He got more subs because google algorithm inexplicably put his content in people's recommendations. why?
Bel Rick why is it inexplicable?
Outstanding quality of material; I cannot believe one can find a video like this on RUclips. Thanks Prof. for uploading such high quality videos, you should have many many more subscribers, this channel is sooo underrated... p.s. How can he remember the fission byproducts by heart so easily?? I cannot even remember what I ate for lunch...
He takes more pride in his work than you do in your lunch ;)
Before he became a professor he worked at a nuclear power plant.
That's how much knowledge this guy has
Good stuff. People comment that they wonder if he learned to write backward to do this; the answer is no, he writes normally on a glass sheet in front of him that he is being photographed trough. However, in the playback, the image is reversed right to left, and so the writing appears normal. However, you can notice small things, like his lapel pin is on the right rather than left side and his shirt pocket in other videos of the series being on his right side.
The thing that brought that home was the photo of Yucca mountain. It is usually photographed from the SSE so that the active side is shown, and it stretches from the neat lower left towards the upper right in the distance, but in this photo it is opposite. I was wondering if he had a different mountain in mind until he said the name.
Anyway, kudos on the series.
We made some of these Lightboards in school that have LED lights along the perimeter that light up whatever is written on it with fluorescent markers and the camera mirrors it.
Looking at it again, the giveaway for me is the jacket buttons. I'm not sure if they're ever made both ways, but his buttons are on the left side instead of the right.
He wears a woman's blazer, with the buttons on his left and the button holes on his right.
Need to respect he has better penmanship in reverse then I’ve ever had.
I bet if you also filmed yourself writing on a pane of glass and then flipped the video horizontally, your "reverse" penmanship would be just as good as your normal one.
@@johnsvensson6446 Thanks for answering this question! Especially for those who may not be as well versed with clever techniques used in video production.
@@johnsvensson6446 Exactly. If we look closely we can see the pocket on his suit coat is on the "wrong side" as are his watch, lapel pin, and buttons on suit coat
Set up a molten salt Thorium reactor next to your regular nuclear power plant and you not only get about 500MW more power to sell, but you no longer have to worry about radioactive waste because the Thorium reactor will consume that waste!
NO! You can split a heavy atom only once. yes you can split the U, Pu and the other transuranium waste. The mentiond 800kg of fission products are the most radioaktive stuff.
You could simply use trivalant fuel that contains U Pu Th plus minor actinides to create a very even burning long life reactor rod that would create its own fuel as it ages. The fuel would be as nitride or carbide. If the minor activities were removed, it would be only a bit stronger in activity than a straightforward uranium rod when green and still have the same burnup properties. These rods would have roughly a 15-year life compared to a 3 year lifespan, plus they would not need the typical fuel pin rotations nearly as much as straightforward uranium rods because the hot zone would migrate outward as the 239Pu and 233U are generated.
Extremely clearly made lectures. Thoroughly enjoyable to listen to.
To give context as to how much a ton is. I routinely run through at least 3 coils of steel that weigh one ton each in a shift at my factory job. A 1 ton coil of steel is about a meter and a half in diameter (less the hole in the center for the mandrel for the spool I load the steel onto to run through a stamping press). I use a crane to lift and move the coil, but I still have to (and can) use old-fashioned muscle power to help manhandle it into position (mainly by arresting any excess swinging due to the crane setup). Obviously, I wouldn't do this with high-level waste without some serious safeguards in place, but a ton is basically nothing in the grand scheme of things. As a fun experiment do this: go to a Costco or Sam's Club with a large flat cart like you'd use to move large loads. Now load 40 bags of dog food weighing 50 pounds each onto the cart from the pallet they're stored on. Congratulations: you just move one ton of material and it isn't as tiring as you'd expect as long as you're in reasonably decent physical shape.
I handled used fuel rods for DOE using large crane to load in casks to put on trucks.
Fuel went to France for reprocess.
That’s a bonkers shipping process to get it that far away
@@basedgodstrugglin Well, people can't complain about "muh back yard" at least. We have ways to deal with this stuff.
I'm quite confident the sound of that marker can make uranium fission all on its own. You may have a new energy production method going here!
Sure made me stop the video and move on ^^
Mantramurtim well if you did stop because of the marker, you clearly don’t care about the content. His whole channel is very educational and worth a listen. The marker squeak is practically a hallmark of the channel by now
@@PhotonBread Aspies freak out over little stuff like that, and I bet there are a lot of them in the nuclear industry.
I really like these. Also, he sounds like the Grand Nagus quite often, which I also like
Let's get one item perfectly straight. You "burn" U-235 and it turns into fission products; some of the inert ingredients turn into transuranides. That and the inert stuff is all in the spent fuel. Very good.
There's lots of talk here about "burning" (that is, fissioning) the waste. That's perfectly feasible for the transuranides, the long-lasting (20,000 years scarry stuff) mildly intense radioactive wastes. Most of them, like the plutonium, are fissile, and so are ready for adding their bit to civilization. That can be done.
The fission products, on the other hand, cannot be so burned. Trying to do so in a reactor will only result in more highly radioactive fission products added to those created in the burning. The only way to handle fission products is to cask them and wait for them to decay. They are fairly fast (and therefore highly intense, compared to the tranuranides). Most of those will be decayed away in about 300 years. All the FPs released in the Chernobyl disaster have already decayed to about 40% of their original values.
So the LFTR people can quit saying that they burn all the waste. They don't and cannot. They can certainly burn the scarry long-lived stuff, and that's all we care about. The rest can rest in cans much safer than coal ash waste dams for the relatively few years needed. That is, the stuff that can't be profitably chemically separated out and used commercially.
Left-handed mirror writing gets an automatic thumbs up from me, no matter the subject!
He isn’t writing backwards, the video is mirror imaged.
I love watching his videos, he makes it easy for an idiot like me to understand
kinda ironic statement with this user name
You're confusing irony with enigmatic
You are not an idiot if you are watching these videos
Yes this one is made for idiots! Whahahahaaaa!
@@themonkeyspaw7359 I'm watching.........explain that! (:^))3
one further point - the "waste" is not really waste.
It is just a mix of materials that is currently not used in reactors. But since the 80s we had functioning breeder reactors that could take this material and reprocess it. Yep - nuclear reactors that run of the "waste" of other reactors and turn it back into "fuel".
Some of them were constructed in running in their preliminary phases but alter shut down due to the fear mongering over Chernobyl.
We now also have reactor-designs that could directly use that "waste" as fuel.
Yep, like MOX fuel
Actually, the idea of breeder reactors was shut down by the US government because of proliferation issues. The greatest impediment to creating nuclear weapons is the relative scarcity of plutonium. Producing lots of plutonium, which is what breeder reactors do, is a fantastically bad idea unless the idea of making nuclear weapons easier to make appeals to you.
Cheers,
Alan Tomlinson
@@diegorhoenisch62 "was shut down by the US government because"
The US govenrment shut down reactors in France, Germany, Russia and more?
The creation of plutonium played an important role - but that is the other way around: Breeder-reactors normally tend burn or recycle plutonium, not produce it. Plutonium it self is produced as a by-product of fast fission reactors and fast-breeders alike.
And the biggest part were still the eco-terrorists that even managed to get material/medical research reactors shut down.
And if you are concerned about nuclear weapons..... plutonium was used cause it was easier to get started with that, but nearly the entire stockpile uses uranium.
Plutonium is way better suited for energy production and other uses like for medical procedures.
It's waste. Come back when we're reprocessing waste. Probably never as we'll move on to fusion.
@@carlbennett2417 "Come back when we're reprocessing waste."
We have had that 50 years ago already but then the eco-terrorists came.
Watching these video's, I don't even know how people can oppose the idea of more nuclear power! Thank you for an factual, interesting and real video of the topic! You've earned yourself a sub!
People fear what they don't understand much more if they can't see it. Is the ideal boogeyman.
There's no reason I need to know this, but damn is it interesting.
Isn't there though? With nuclear reactors powering some hydrogen production facilities, we could've easily been entirely green (atmospherically and climatically) by now. But "wooooh, nuclear so dangerous" -sarcasm voice. Public opinion matters.
Keep explaining stuff, professor. you are very good at This format!
It's only waste if you don't use it. As the prof. said, there are many useful isotopes still locked in those fuel rods that can be reprocessed. France which generates over 80% of its power from nuclear power is very aggressive at recycling their waste into other useful fuels and keeping their actual waste very low. If you take all those "waste" and reprocessed them, it is even less we have to deal with.
I love this guy ... a natural teacher.
The squeaking of the marker is sooooooooooooo satisfying.
These videos are extremely interesting the way he presents them.
You can't use Yucca Mountain because Stargate Command is already there.
I think you mean Space Force.
@@SailfishSoundSystem Oh yeah, Cheyenne Mountain was Stargate. Oops.
@Ordinary Sessel Yeah, just send it off to other planets, because Humans. LOL
@@markgigiel2722 Or just put it on a stand in front of the gate and turn it on. Kawoosh!
You can't use Antarctica because it would melt a hole in the ice wall and all the water would run off the edge of the flat Earth
Absolutely loving your videos and presentation - I'm re-teaching myself various sciences, including quantum physics - your presentations are a great way to put certain processes into perspective.
Thanks for the knowledge 🖖
I am amazed not only with the knowledge but that you can write so nicely backwards.
It is image reversed. Look at the professor's belt buckle, which side his shirt buttons on, which hand his wedding ring is on...
These videos are consistently very well made.
What a great professor. It’s incredible how i can sit at my kitchen bar and get a wonderful lecture for free($15/month, no commercials)
That was another great lecture! Thank you. Greetings from Arizona.
So what do we do with the waste? Well, the first thing we do is take them out of the reactor 😂. I've been binge watching this guy all day. Going to have myself a PhD by tomorrow morning. Seriously tho, good stuff!
This whole series of videos is incredible! Anyone that isn't trying to educate themselves about the changes in nuclear power technology isn't really serious about dealing with climate change or protecting natural habitats.
Great content. On top of that, he wrote backwards (mirror) text the whole time. Amazing
The image is mirrored in post production.
Outstanding Professor.
Can I use it for my house water heater? BTW the professor is awesome! We should have more nuclear plants sounds super safe.
if you processed some of the fission products that have longer decay lifespan, then yes you could use as a heater, I'm not sure it's as cheap as it sounds or if the risks are worth it, but it could be done
"Worrying about the small amount of high level nuclear waste is probably not the smartest thing to do"
Everybody gangsta until Vnimanie Vnimanie
This channel, that's the good stuff!
it's crazy people argue nuclear is safe, but you need all these levels of precautions and complications to kind of avoid any mess
Finland is currently the only country digging one of those nuclear tombs. It may turn out to be unnecessary in the future, but it is the safer alternative, and I gather it makes people feel a little bit easier about nuclear energy.
If you haven't done a video yet on the topic, would you ever consider doing a segment on the use of vitrification of high-level waste, and how that works, as well as its potential cost vs benefits?
I really enjoyed your content, will be watching much more!
Thank you!
This channel is great, I've watched all the videos. Thank you very much.
The main thing I have learned after watching numerous videos from Illinois EnergyProf and other nuclear scientific channels is that Nuclear energy is the energy that WILL save us if we just utilize it correctly.
The second thing I have learned is that there is far more misinformation regarding nuclear energy than there is correct information, and the people of the United States are horrendously misinformed and misguided about nuclear energy.
I love how you explain the measurements of radiation, ive watched other videos and they just say the doses people get but often use 3 types of measurements but i dont know what they all are compared to each other but you did great explaonong it
“Compared with all the other waste systems we have in the US ... “ That’s a very important statement. Nuclear gets a bad rap. It’s high in our consciousness bc of Chernobyl, TMI and Fukushima. But if we only knew how many other chemicals we dump into the environment DAILY far surpassing nuclear ... causing health problems ... we’d spend more of our energy on those chemicals than the boogeyman of nuclear waste. Nuclear is a drop in the ocean compared to conventional chemical waste. ☮️❤️
Why do they change the rods when they've only used a small fraction of their Uranium? Is it because of the inert U-236? It seems wasteful.
It isn't fissionable because of the waste content. It gets in the way and absorbs neutrons without undergoing fission. This is why they should be taken out and reprocessed.
6Twisted ...The fuel rods are separated by control rods. You pull the control rods out and expose the fuel, it fissions, goes critical, hot rock make power.
Over time you have to pull the control rods higher as the fuel burns. Eventually the reactor can't maintain criticality and the fuel rods are considered spent.
One of the main hurdles to maintaining criticality is the creation of Xenon.
Anyways: It is inefficient and that's why new technology is being researched. Like the LFTR molten salt reactor.
A few reasons. Think of fuel rods like a camp fire, the sticks on the outside burn up slower than the sticks on the inside so it’s gotta be shuffled around a bit, Also, one of the fission products is inconveniently a gas, this puts really high pressures on the individual fuel pellets and it will eventually cause them to burst open, which is bad. Solid fuels aren’t that great
@@Bloated_Tony_Danza Because only the U-235 releases more than one neutron per fission. So once there isn't enough U-235 the rod doesn't get hot enough to boil water
You sound confused, off to the infirmary.
I dont understand in a water moderated reactor if you take out the fuel roads and put them inside the cooling pool fool of water you dont get a fision reaction again since ypu are moderating your neutrons again. Can you explain please?
The water in these pools is heavily borated. The boron is a neutron poisson (it captures neutrons, but does not fission and thus does not create neutrons) and thus inhibits the reaction. Furthermore, the fuel, placed in the fuel pools, is spent fuel. i.e. a lot of there fissile material is already fissioned. The fission products in the spent fuel also act as a neutron poisson. The distance between fuel assemblies is often larger than in the reactor, creating greater leakage of neutrons. And lastly, the placement in the pools is such that more depleted assemblies (less U235, i.e. less fuel and more fission products, i.e. more poisson) are placed next to less depleted assemblies in order to not get a critical configuration.
In normal circumstances, the spent fuel pools are managed in such a way, that every point that I dicussed on its own is sufficient to inhibit a nuclear chain reaction.
@@Louis-sl1jh dear Louis I dont see the problem that easy since : !.- The water in the pool is evaporating with the heat is receiving from the fuel rods so is needed to be cooling it or repacing it . I dont know if just the water go away and the borate stays and do not evaporate ( like sulphuric acid in de car bateries) and always stays there.
2 .- In respect that the fuel si already poor we wil have to analized it because U235 has been used and is les but plutonium has been produced and since it has been long time esposed to the neutron bombardmente a lot of plutonium 240 has been produces and that isotop is more radioactive. Can you please explain in more detail? Thank you very much for your answer and your time I will be attentive wating your explanation.
@@ernestoterrazas3480 The water is cooled to limit evaporation. Boric acid will not evaporate (crisalized boric acid on a pipe= white powder might point to a leak). The water level and boric acid level in the spent fuel pont is continiously monitored to keep the water level high enough (shielding and cooling, some evaporation will always take place) and that the water is borated enough to keep the reactivity negative (subcritical state). The boron concentration is always kept to a level that rho active control) in the storage pool I know, "spaces" in the grid in the pool are often left empty in order to facilitate leakage.
In short: boron does not evaporate and it is made sure that the concentration is high enough in the pool that even if it is completely filled with fresh assemblies, it would not get critical.
The spent fuel simply doesn't have enough U235 left. The majority of the neutron don't reach any U235 atoms, which create less fission, which create less neutrons, which lower even more the chance of a neutron reaching a U235 atoms, until there is basically no more reaction at all. At this point it's spent fuel and no matter what you do to it, there won't be much fission.
@@Louis-sl1jh Dear Louis Thank you very much for your explanation.
I love your youtube channel. I'm not a nuclear scientist (well, maybe an armchair nuclear scientist), but I continue to be fascinated by the energy locked in the atom, and really think that it's the best base load source we have now, and for the most part, it's pretty darn safe. TV shows like Chernobyl have done well to show how the accident there was entirely preventable and 100% human error. And as long as we continue to learn from history, it will be safer and safer in the future.
Your videos are excellent your knowledge is exquisite your means of explanation is intuitive and I cannot get enough of your videos
Good, informative video. But it did drive my cat crazy. *squeak*squeak*squeak*
The problem with above ground dry cask storage is that it lacks protection from something like a terroristic attack or an act of war.
Any power plant is a target during war or under terrorist attack conditions, whether it's nuclear fueled or fossil fueled. Bigger target still is the water system. Reservoirs have to be open to the air. The dangers associated with nuclear power are outrageously exaggerated. This is entirely intentional.
Less than half of US spent fuel is in dry casks.
Over 80,000 tonnes is still in cooling ponds. Much less robust and much more vulnerable to attack or neglect.
I've learned more with this guy about nuclear physics and radiation than all my 10 years of clases in college
I love you youtube videos' you need to teach everyone!!!!!!!!!!!! i cant stop watching your video's and the writing backwards is awesome
The Naivity this guy shows in this video is mind boggling ;)
So long before Christmas too!
what a wonderful teacher!!
Just the facts. Love it!
I see nuclear waste as almost never ending sorce of energy.
Anti Nuclear power was Soviet Cold war social weapons that live on in the organisations that they spawned
30 tons generates power for 3 years? sounds like a great source of fuel to me :)
@@sinephase watch "Into Eternity" a docu about nuclear waste. This stuff has to be stored safely for 100,000 years (half-life) or destroy the planet.
@@The-Dom having a long half life means it's a relatively stable form of the element. The shorter the half life, the more radioactive it is.
@@sinephase is that so
They start crumbling at some far future time, and they we let them keep crumbling until they breech and contaminate everything because it is not profitable to maintain the containment.
Or because our state has collapsed and noone is paid to care. That, I think, is the strongest case for burial - it doesn't require civilization in order to stay safe.
@@galfisk As long as nuclear reactors produce energy they are a source of income so there will be money to look after their waste. To me burial is quite in tune with our modern mentality: just put our waste far away from us and pretend it does no longer belong to us. I think there's much more chance than in 200 years from now we better know what to do with those wastes than today. And I hope they will judge us for our tendency to throw away what we don't like to handle.
BTW new civilizations replaces the fallen ones since civilizations exist. The new thing today being, IMO, that the concept of civilization becomes obsolete in a world where almost everybody is interconnected. I live thousands miles away from the US and I am talking with you about nuclear wastes in that country, this is crazy if you think about it. And if I look at how Europeans countries are paying (in a time of "crisis") for the management of the Tchernobyl site, I tend to think money won't be an issue for the upcoming centuries in that field. So keep them where they are until we have better solutions than a costly magic trick.
All that stuff came out of the ground in the first place. Burying it in containers is even safer than it was before it was dug up in the first place.
Well, they have maintained (replaced) the The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant sarcophagus. Granted it hasn't been very long and a bit different than many small storage canisters....... Yeah, who am I kidding?! They'll let them leak.
Killing DeadThings
Well up until very recently the other reactor on site was still running and producing power. They couldn't afford to shut it down.
I want one in my garden. Just to annoy everyone around.
Sad that its not glowing like in movies... that would be best garden light in the world...
Spent fuel does Glow.For example if you put Plutonium into Glassblocks to shield it, they glow blueish.
@@blacktimhoward4322 no you are not. certainly cherenkov radiation is visible but the most of the ionizing radiation is blocked by water. you could even stare at nuclear power plant that being started up inside experimental reactor
@@royk7712 started up? You could stare at an experimental 1 MW reactor at full power all day long, the only thing you'd get is bored.
But how do we store all the waste CO2 of oil, gas, and coil in a contained and geologically stable fashion?
Christoph Michelbach
How dumb are you
You can just capture it and bury it underground or better yet, make synthetic fuels.
@@tomvice I don't know. Why do you ask?
Christoph Michelbach
The domain of nuclear waste processing is completely unrelated to fossil fuels releasing CO2
Your dumb question reveals you have no grasp of what's going on
You're talking about arts and crafts at a demolition seminar
Web Wanderer
Another dumb shit. Go away
Those dry casks stored above ground at plants like that would be a prime target for terrorist attack. Imagine the mess if someone dived a plane into the group of them
Designed so even a large airliner won't do anything but shatter itself. Plus the rumors of air defense at some plants.
An aircraft shouldn't be able to really penetrate these types of concrete and steel steel in the first place provided they are not paper thin, since they're essentially hollow aluminum tubes with fragile wings. The only part that could deal the most damage would be the engine cores. So the risk should be minimal.
Yucca Mountain waste disposal is a very good idea but Germany or Eurpean only have salt mines which are unstable .
Europe has several docent locations that have been found to be stable and more than adequate - but the constant fearmongering of lunatics prevents any progress.
Heck - there are even locations that were ruled out not because they are too unstable or unsafe but because they are naturally TOO RADIOACTIVE so that nuclear workers there would reach the exposure-limit just from the natural radiation.
I think Germany were a bit too quick to use disposal sites because they thought they could use the convenient deep salt mines; both the DDR and BRD came to a similar solution so it must have seemed like a good, cheap idea at the time.
Unfortunately Germany (as a whole) has managed to be both too gung-ho (AVR reactor, salt mine storage) and too cautious (let's shut down all our nuclear power plants and replace them with coal without having a proper debate, post-Fukushima) with regards to the nuclear power.
Yucca *is* great, AggrarFarmer, but as the Professor points out, not really necessary. It was overkill, and I think because they went to such extreme (and unnecessary) lengths to make it safe, that the reaction was to actually *increase* fear ("oh, see how dangerous it is that you built something like *that* to store the waste in??").
I love your videos. Thank you from Portsmouth England.
Ahh, the perfect way to store forever radio active waste - the opperational word here is Perfect.
The dry storage option seems way too optimistic regarding the enthusiasm of our socioeconomic system to monitor and maintain critical infrastructure.
We keep track of our children's welfare for hundreds of thousands of generations already. How hard can it be? Are our children perfect generations after generations? No. There are great generations and there are fucked up drugged up generations. But as long as we carry on, we continue on.
We currently kill millions annually with air pollution from burning fossil fuels for electricity so burying HLW in a safe repository doesn't seem so bad to me.
DD: Our social system has nothing to do with infrastructure maintenance. Don't mix terms.
I don't trust dry option either. People forgetting about nuclear waste has happened before. Look up the details of the Goiânia accident.
@@willworkforfood7028 Explain to me how a medical instrument is the same as a dry cask.
The elaborate disposal of the radioactive waste must have a pretty stiff cost: the storage in a special water pool for years, the encapsulation of the material, transportation, the everything-proof cave for permanent storage, etc. does not come cheap. Are these costs factored into the profit / loss accounting of the nuclear power plant?
Special water pool? My friend, thats just a hole in the ground that they filled with water added some boron and a large pool pump.
And yes its factored in, people try really really hard to make nuclear uncompetitive for reasons beyond me.
Absolutely, as well as decommissioning the plant.
As far as the pool goes not a whole lot to go wrong with it, biggest things are keeping the water flowing through a pump and making sure Radiolysis does not occur in the water causing a environment potential for a explosion.
Digging into a mountain is super expensive and not really done all that much for the reasons stated in the video; expense for no real benefit.
Despite the assurances, no they are NOT fully factored in.
Cooling pond costs hit the operator of the reactor, and they expected spent fuel to be "cooled" for about five years. Most cooling pools are now overcrowded, some have fuel assemblies over twenty years old.
The costs of dry cask storage are in dispute. The Feds currently subsidise the costs of monitoring and inspection and security. Costs hundreds of millions.
Final geological disposal is also in dispute. The industry wants the Feds to pay for it. The Feds want industry levies to pay. There was such a levy, but the industry stopped paying in 2010. There is 44Billion in the fund. Based on the current stockpile (140,000 tonnes), and the costs of the failed Yucca mountain facility (plus inflation), then the 44Billion is less than half what is required. The costs of WIPP are not comparable as WIPP is for low level waste, and a little intermediate waste (with which they have had issues).
So, the costs of extended temporary and interim dry storage have not been fully factored in and require federal subsidy, and the costs of final geological disposal are both high and severely underfunded with no real commitment from industry or Government to actually cover those costs.
Well, there goes my next business idea making affordable nuclear waste containers out of recycled 50 gallon drums and packing peanuts. Why does it always have to be so complicated?
Dude all this information about nuclear power on all fronts is super interesting! Great educational value!
Nice informercial
News flash... not all nuclear waste comes from power plants. A lot come from nuclear powered submarines, air craft carriers etc as a DOD truck driver I moved a lot from Olympia, Washington, Sunny Point, North Carolina and Groton, Rhode Island.
I’m constantly distracted at his ability to write backwards.
The video is actually just mirrored, thats why he looks left handed
@@murph3292 So simple, yet I didnt realise :D
Didn't focus on that until you mentioned it. Screw you.
Yeah, the backwards writing is trippy.
They really should just post it at the top that its mirrored and delete all these comments.
Very good explanation. I had the same thinking of leaving the waste at the powerplant. Curious if this idea will be picked up.
I dont get why this channel has 70k subs. It should have 700k+
It's the 10+ years in the water that's the real risk. This is what's scared everyone in Japan accident. 4x more highly radioactive material sitting in the those pritty blue pools. If the circulation stops water dries up and it melts.
If it melts it spreads out and cools faster, all within the containment building.
@@Willaev highly radioactive waste keeps generating heat, and catches fire without proper cooling
@@ChristiaanHunter And then it melts and spreads out, increasing its surface area for cooling and increasing the distance between the fissioning materials decreasing their rate.
Only fresh HLW can melt like that. After few years, it can stay out of the water and it won't heat up to its melting point, not even close.
Outstanding lecture
Dude ever been to Hanford, WA? Heard of the OLD HUGE underground SS tanks with a nice layer of screaming "hot" peanut butter that farts hydrogen and are next to the Columbia River? Products of weapons manufacture which you don't talk about decades has gone into clean up and very little progress made, if any.
Very informative and easy to understand video. Nuclear power needs to be considered going forward. As I look at paying 43 cents / kWh in San Diego and rising we need reasonable solutions other than each home becoming its own power plant (solar).
I want to watch every video Professor Ruzic makes!
My only problem with the dry cask storage is the potential for terrorists to get hold of the material and use it for a dirty bomb. At least when the casks are stored 1000+ feet underground, it's protected from terrorists.
Most spent fuel is not in dry casks.
Any of it would be deadly for terrorists to try and steal.
Also deadly if terrorists blew it up. Who would clean up that mess?
Prof can you make a video on next generation nuclear reactors that take the nuclear waste and use it to make more electricity like the molten salt nuclear reactor designed by Transatomic?
is there a loss of mass that can be corrilated to the energy produced? mas to energy?
It's called "mass defect." www.wikihow.com/Calculate-Mass-Defect
In the pic at 7:06, I don't think the thing sticking up out of the water is a fuel rod; it is either a dummy or a tool being used, or perhaps a rod that's been in the pool for more than 5 years. When refueling, the spent fuel rods are extracted from the flooded reactor, moved through a water channel to the pool, kept at least a meter below the surface at all times. When fresh, they would be frightfully dangerous out of the water from their gamma radiation.
It's a handling tool for new fuel. There's an air-operated grapple on the end of it.
Did he actually learn how to write backwards. Respect
The image is mirrored in post production.
Maybe a dumb question. Is it possible to strip away the nuetrons from the transuranium atoms to transmutate it back to useable material? Or would that use more energy than created during the 3 years it was used?
How about the other fission byproducts like Cs137 and Sr-90?
such an amazing video , i am hooked
For some reason this is my favorite video by this awesome Professor. Plus it's also great to know the real truth about nuclear waste, not some amped up malarky by the news media warning us the earth is in danger of blowing up or some nonsense.
The numbers below the line add up to more mass than above the line. You'd expect the opposite since some of the mass was used to make electricity. Is there a mistake somewhere?
Technically the mass should be slightly lower since some of it was changed into energy. The Fission energy density of U-235 is 19,390,000 MJ/kg 2.65 tons is 2404 kg so the expected energy output is 4.66x10^10MJ which will burn about 518 grams of mass according to E=mc^2. (Assuming all of my sources were correct.) I think it was just an error of approximation. Normally when you're dealing with things like radioactive waste you round up to give a worst case scenario.
He acknowledges that the 28.5 is rounded figure, which makes sense as there would be some minor variation. Also in the case of nuclear energy mass isn't really used up to make electricity, as is the case which traditional chemical based fuels, rather the energy from the fission reaction is used, so it as actually possible for the mass of the products to be equal to or greater than the mass of the reactants as it is a nuclear reaction not a chemical reaction.
@@lukek4662 Err, no... you lose about 200MeV of energy per fission event, which means all the bits left over are somewhat lighter than the original fissioning nucleus.
@@drtidrow I'm not saying that this is usually the case not that that is the case here, only that in certain nuclear power systems that it is possible. As I said the discrepancy here is due to rounding.
What does the HLW eventually decay into? Just a non radioactive heavy metal?
Lead probably
After a very very very long time - yes. Going down to the stable elements takes a long time. The waste is mostly barely radioactive material and the later products have indredible long halflife.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radioactive_decay_chains_diagram.svg
For most of the elements their direct toxicity is a lot worse than the damage the radiation could cause. Nobody complains about arsenic never vanishing.
I love the “making lemonade out of lemons.” Keeping distributed high level waste at each reactor is an epic national failure of government, one I’ll blame Harry Reid for forever.
The containment casks should have ThermoCouple(s) installed so they are putting out a constant electrical discharge (a SNAP Generator not based on Pu). Take advantage of the waste to do work!
Wait 'til you find out he isn't left-handed, but The Dread Pirate Roberts!
Thank you for the amazing video!
Why take it out and put it in the ground if it still gives off energy? Why replace it? Did he mention that?
That is so interesting ! I love learning about this topic. I'm still trying to get more intuition about it all. For example, the fuel pellets - is each one it's own self contained nuclear fission volume ? That is to say, when a neutron is emitted, it is absorbed within the same fuel pellet - it never crosses whatever void is there to interact with another fuel pellet. Is that understanding correct ? Thank you.
No, that's rarely the case. The neutrons ejected from a fission event are high energy - they would simply escape from the reactor if they were not moderated. The moderation is applied externally to the fuel rod.
@@puncheex2 Ohh, amazing. So the neutron is ejected at high energy, passes out of the fuel pellet, through a moderator, then back at lower energy into a (potentially different) fuel pellet to initiate another fission event ? So the path it traverses could be what ... centimeters in distance ?
@@hv1461 Yup. If you require the moderation to make the neutron useful in the "thermal" energy range, that's what has to happen.
It’s also why the fuel rods need to be close together to sustain critical fission. And shielding is used to reflect neutrons back to increase efficiency.
thanks for good intro, Prof 👍
What about those fission products like gasses and metals created out of Uranium? Gasses can pose an explosion threat
Sir why can't we make gold from nuclear fission. Why can't U235 be decayed into stable gold?
Very well explained.....but ARGGHHH SCREEECHY MARKER!!! Nails down a blackboard....
I live in a country with a nuclear power plant but it never started 😞
I used to use the plume from TMI's remaining functional unit for rough navigation, as I'm only a handspan of miles from the island. Alas, a year and month ago, they shuttered the plant, as the electricity cost double what NG burning electrical energy costs.
But, CO2 is good, it is what made Venus the paradise that it is today.
eww fuel rods.. 2 loop salt fueled and cooled is the way to go... what problems does a pebble bed solve? from 5% to 7~8%?