Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Pay there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says trash, don't
Speaker 1: pick it up, take them lights away. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren, and I'm Joe McCormick. So in our last podcast,
Speaker 1: we talked about the problem of radioactive waste and how
Speaker 1: it's a pretty serious one. It's one that we have
Speaker 1: to lend serious consideration too, so that we can find
Speaker 1: a solution that doesn't know or radiate people unnecessarily or
Speaker 1: even necessarily. Yes, we talked about some of the waste
Speaker 1: facilities that are currently in existence and the main kind
Speaker 1: that we would really like to have that is currently
Speaker 1: not in existent. So today I figured we'd take a
Speaker 1: little more forward looking, uh look on the show called
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Maybe a little more a forward glancing look,
Speaker 1: a forward looking glance. How about we just sort of
Speaker 1: explore the different options that may or may not be
Speaker 1: open to us as far as dealing with nuclear waste. Right, Well,
Speaker 1: let's do a little bit of recap on the last episode.
Speaker 1: So one of the things we learned is that not
Speaker 1: all nuclear waste is the same exactly. So the vast
Speaker 1: majority of the nuclear waste that is produced, or radioactive
Speaker 1: waste is what's called low level waste or intermediate level waste.
Speaker 1: And this is about nineties seven percent of all nuclear
Speaker 1: waste generated, but only five percent of the radioactivity. Right,
Speaker 1: So what is this stuff? Well, it's stuff that's been
Speaker 1: in contact with radioactive material and has picked up some
Speaker 1: radioactivity because of that, either it's radioactive dust or the
Speaker 1: radioactive material itself has started to cause some ionizing reactions.
Speaker 1: So intermediate level waste tends to be stuff that's been
Speaker 1: in contact with radioactive waste for a while, like filters,
Speaker 1: parts of a reactor, this kind of thing. I think
Speaker 1: that probably also stuff like like filings from uranium mills
Speaker 1: fall into that general probably. Yeah, this gets kind of
Speaker 1: weird because different countries classify things in slightly different ways.
Speaker 1: But then low level waste would include stuff that's had
Speaker 1: less intense contact with radioactive material but still has come
Speaker 1: into contact with it. So tools, uh, protective clothing and gear,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing that might fall into that category,
Speaker 1: and we have to find ways to deal with all
Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, these lower level wastes, they are still
Speaker 1: somewhat radioactive, so we do have to be careful in
Speaker 1: how we're dealing with them. Yeah, you don't want your
Speaker 1: children to swallow them, right, so disposal, take that Take
Speaker 1: that protective over you know, protective apron out of your mouth, Jimmy. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: some gloves are more delicious than others, I guess. So anyway,
Speaker 1: the low level waste is not all that dangerous. It's
Speaker 1: not good, but it's it's not something it's not our
Speaker 1: main concerns. It's the sort of stuff that we can
Speaker 1: safely disposed of in uh in a essentially a trench
Speaker 1: or pit and covered with with soil, and it will
Speaker 1: be uh, it will be secure enough where we don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about that affecting people. Yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: the intermediate level waste is intermediate. But what comes after
Speaker 1: intermediate high level waste, high level waste, that is what
Speaker 1: is a big problem. Yeah, we're not talking about pants. No,
Speaker 1: it's not a high level waste. It's not an eighties
Speaker 1: genes kind of thing. Now, we're talking about waste that
Speaker 1: is highly radioactive. This is the stuff that makes up
Speaker 1: the radioactivity, even though it's only three percent of the
Speaker 1: volume of waste. Yeah, So for the purpose of this podcast,
Speaker 1: we might just say high level waste to include all
Speaker 1: the things were about to mention. But some people make
Speaker 1: a distinction between spent nuclear fuel and what they then
Speaker 1: call high level waste. On top of that, high level
Speaker 1: waste being what has been processed out of spent fuel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so if you get if you have spent fuel, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have spent fuel, you do some reprocessing of it,
Speaker 1: so you can recapture uranium and plutonium from that spin
Speaker 1: fuel that have not been burned. Yeah, because as it
Speaker 1: turns out, not very much of it gets consumed in
Speaker 1: these nuclear reactors. It doesn't It doesn't take much for
Speaker 1: a nuclear rod, for example, to become inefficient, so it's
Speaker 1: no longer heating up water to the levels that we
Speaker 1: needed to. But there's still plenty of uranium and plutonium
Speaker 1: in there, and those are important resources. So if we're
Speaker 1: able to reprocess it, we can recapture that uranium and plutonium.
Speaker 1: But there's gonna be some stuff left over that is
Speaker 1: not going to be useful for us, and it's really radioactive.
Speaker 1: That is high level waste. So we're probably going to
Speaker 1: be using high level waste to refer to both that
Speaker 1: and the spent nuclear fuel. Just keep in mind that
Speaker 1: there are other people and organizations that do differentiate between
Speaker 1: the two. There are different things. They're just for the
Speaker 1: practical purpose. They're both very radioactive and very dangerous. So alright,
Speaker 1: so we talked about our last podcast. We mentioned yucka
Speaker 1: mountain in Nevada was going to be a geological repository.
Speaker 1: This place where we would be able to put spent
Speaker 1: nuclear fuel or high level waste or both uh and
Speaker 1: have it safely locked away so that it could not
Speaker 1: hurt people for ten thousand years? Was really the idea
Speaker 1: or longer? Right? And we mentioned these kind of off
Speaker 1: the cuff and mentioned them as well, this is what
Speaker 1: is generally agreed upon to be the best idea. So
Speaker 1: so why is that? What's going on with these things? Exactly?
Speaker 1: So the reason why it's considered to be the best
Speaker 1: idea is because it has a whole lot of separation
Speaker 1: between us and nuclear waste. But let's talk about what
Speaker 1: how many either actually are in existence? Because that's a
Speaker 1: real sticking point, right, That's right. There are zero currently
Speaker 1: in operation for high level waste or for spent fuel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so why why are these uh, these facilities, these deep
Speaker 1: geological repositories ideal for high level waste. Well, I mean again,
Speaker 1: it keeps it really far away from people. It's you know,
Speaker 1: we're talking about a finding a place on Earth where
Speaker 1: we can bury this stuff where you're you're not too
Speaker 1: worried about the geological features changing dramatically over the next
Speaker 1: hundred thousand years. You want it to remain as stable
Speaker 1: as possible because you want it to contain that nuclear waste.
Speaker 1: So you don't want to put it in a place
Speaker 1: where there's going to be a lot of like earthquakes,
Speaker 1: your volcanic activity, and that both of those would be
Speaker 1: very bad. Yeah, you don't want to have any any
Speaker 1: chance of or you want to minimize the chances of
Speaker 1: any sort of breach. You want it to be safe, Like,
Speaker 1: you don't want it to be in a really tropical region.
Speaker 1: You don't want there to be a lot of water present,
Speaker 1: So you want to find an arid or semi arid
Speaker 1: kind of area where water is not as big a problem.
Speaker 1: You want to be able to isolate the the chamber
Speaker 1: wherever you're putting the stuff, the repository itself from any water,
Speaker 1: whether it's runoff from from rain or if it's a
Speaker 1: water that's underground, you want to make sure it's safe
Speaker 1: from all of that so it doesn't contaminate any those
Speaker 1: water sources, which could then go go on to enter
Speaker 1: into various ecosystems and contaminate them. That would be bad
Speaker 1: as well. So you mentioned that there were zero in
Speaker 1: operation for high level waste. Are their geological repositories for
Speaker 1: something else, maybe intermediate level waste? Yeah, there are three
Speaker 1: in operation for low and intermediate level waste. Uh. They
Speaker 1: are found in Finland and Sweden. And there's one in
Speaker 1: operation for trans uranic waste in the USA at the
Speaker 1: Waste Isolation Pilot Plant or WHIP. We will be revisiting
Speaker 1: the WHIP facility later on. Yeah. So uh we mentioned
Speaker 1: in the last podcast, but just as a reminder, trans
Speaker 1: uranic waste is one of those terms that is used
Speaker 1: in the United States but not really widely used elsewhere.
Speaker 1: It's generally talking about waste elements with atomic numbers that
Speaker 1: are higher than uranium. It's a byproduct of nuclear research,
Speaker 1: weapons production, and power production. Uh. And it's mostly stuff
Speaker 1: like tools, residue gear and usually only contains a small
Speaker 1: amount of actually radioactive material. It's still dangerous, but it's
Speaker 1: not considered as dangerous as high level waste. It was
Speaker 1: used for the waste isolation pilot plant because you didn't
Speaker 1: have to go whole hog into high level waste in
Speaker 1: your in your pilot program. You know, you want to
Speaker 1: test the pilot program, but you don't want to throw
Speaker 1: everything at it right at once and then risk having
Speaker 1: a catastrophic failure with the worst stuff on the planet. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what's the idea behind the pilot plant. Well, it's
Speaker 1: a facility outside of Carl's Bad New Mexico, and uh,
Speaker 1: it's meant to be a ten thousand years safe facility.
Speaker 1: And we talked a little bit in the last episode
Speaker 1: about the kinds of things that those facilities include. Um,
Speaker 1: what I find really fascinating and kind of charming about
Speaker 1: the waist Isolation Pilot Plant is that it furthermore features
Speaker 1: a number of magnets, radar reflectors, and forty eight stone
Speaker 1: and concrete markers weighing a hundred and five tons each
Speaker 1: that are carved with warnings in seven languages and human
Speaker 1: faces expressing horror in order to drive people away from
Speaker 1: this facility. For years, because the idea being that how
Speaker 1: can we protect and we'll talk more about this later,
Speaker 1: but how can we protect future generations from something as
Speaker 1: dangerous as nuclear waste? Knowing that in ten thousand years time,
Speaker 1: think about the last ten thousand years. I mean, we
Speaker 1: don't have any languages that date from that far back,
Speaker 1: So how would we even know what people how people
Speaker 1: are communicating within ten thousand years? Uh? And UH. One
Speaker 1: of those languages that was mentioned was Navajo because that
Speaker 1: was the native language of the area, UM, which I
Speaker 1: thought was very interesting that that was one of the
Speaker 1: represented languages on these markers. So yeah, very interesting. And
Speaker 1: again we'll revisit that because there's some fascinating things to
Speaker 1: talk about in that respect. On top of that, Uh,
Speaker 1: this year, two thousand fourteen, there were some incidents early
Speaker 1: this year at the waste isolation pilot plant. One of
Speaker 1: those was that there was an incident on February fourt fourteen,
Speaker 1: so Valentine's Day, there was a radiation leak underground. Uh.
Speaker 1: Within a couple of weeks there was detection of airborne
Speaker 1: radioactive particles within a half mile from the facility and ultimately,
Speaker 1: or at least initially thirteen workers were tested positive as
Speaker 1: having radiation exposure. But just I mean, that's serious stuff. Obviously,
Speaker 1: you're talking about a facility designed to contain this stuff
Speaker 1: and there was a containment failure. Um. One of the
Speaker 1: reasons why this is a really serious issue is that
Speaker 1: the if you listen to our last episode, you heard
Speaker 1: us talk about the yuck A Mountain project and how
Speaker 1: political pressures have really set that back to the point
Speaker 1: where it may not ever be used for what it
Speaker 1: was intended. There are some people who are saying we
Speaker 1: should probably look at WHIP as instead the next geological
Speaker 1: repository and upgraded so that we could put high level
Speaker 1: waste there, because now we've got this pilot program. But
Speaker 1: with this radiation leak that really brings that into question too,
Speaker 1: Like is it a good idea when we're talking about
Speaker 1: a low level or intermediary level type of radiation having
Speaker 1: a leakage problem? What happens when we put the high
Speaker 1: level stuff there? If there was a leakage problem with that,
Speaker 1: it could be even more serious. I mean, any radiation
Speaker 1: leakage problem is serious already, but when you're talking about
Speaker 1: catastrophic exactly, Yeah, you could have some some truly devastating effects,
Speaker 1: especially if that radiation gets leaked into the surrounding ecosystem.
Speaker 1: So that's kind of leads into the same discussion we
Speaker 1: had last time. The political issues are huge, Like one,
Speaker 1: you have to figure out where on Earth are the
Speaker 1: prime real estate places for these kind of things. Right, Well,
Speaker 1: that's not so much a political issue, that's sort of
Speaker 1: a scientific no. But that that's the first problem you have.
Speaker 1: It is like, let's just identify where like we obviously
Speaker 1: we can't put these anywhere. We have to put them
Speaker 1: someplace that is geologically ideal for the for a repository.
Speaker 1: That's that's problem one. Yeah, and and even yuck a
Speaker 1: moutain some problems with that. I mean, people were arguing
Speaker 1: that it was too close to fault lines, and yeah
Speaker 1: that there were people who are arguing there was too
Speaker 1: much tectonic activity. There were people who are arguing that
Speaker 1: there was there were too many cracks in the rock itself,
Speaker 1: and of nine potential facilities as the absolute best one.
Speaker 1: So nothing is probably going to be absolutely perfect, right,
Speaker 1: And so first you have to to pick the places
Speaker 1: that you could potentially put this stuff. Then you have
Speaker 1: to convince people that that's what needs to go there,
Speaker 1: and if you live near those places, like we mentioned
Speaker 1: in the last episode, you might have that not in
Speaker 1: my backyard reaction where you do not want this dangerous
Speaker 1: stuff put near you, and very human and understandable reaction.
Speaker 1: It's also one that's problematic because then what do you
Speaker 1: do with all the stuff that's accumulating. So um, yeah,
Speaker 1: these are really big issues. There's also just the question
Speaker 1: of how do you get the nuclear waste from where
Speaker 1: it's generated to where it's supposed to go? Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it opens up the possibility of having a nuclear waste
Speaker 1: transportation accident. There's actually debate going on in Scotland right
Speaker 1: now about whether local plans should be allowed to consolidate
Speaker 1: waste prior to permanent disposal. And you know it's no
Speaker 1: one likes car accidents. No one really likes plutonium involved
Speaker 1: car accidents, right yeah. Doc Brown told us that that's
Speaker 1: a bad idea. Fortunately, as far as I know, I
Speaker 1: don't think there's ever been a radioactive waste transportation accident.
Speaker 1: So they have them pretty well locked down and it's
Speaker 1: an extremely expensive and paperwork filled process. Yeah, it's actually
Speaker 1: one of those where you know, obviously if you're going
Speaker 1: to be transporting something like that, you have to do
Speaker 1: it in a way that is incredibly well coordinated and
Speaker 1: extremely secret, because you don't want to publicize when this
Speaker 1: dangerous stuff is going to be out in the open,
Speaker 1: one site to another dinner bell for potential nuclear weapons makers. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So it's it's certainly one of those things that is
Speaker 1: a high, high priority activity whenever it does happen. Uh.
Speaker 1: And well we'll talk a little bit more about the
Speaker 1: technicalities involved in that later on. Yeah, So let's instead
Speaker 1: of looking at this so that the repository was sort
Speaker 1: of the the big solution that people settled on a
Speaker 1: couple of decades ago. Was saying, all right, this one
Speaker 1: sounds like this is the best idea, And as it
Speaker 1: turns out, there are a lot of human problems that
Speaker 1: make it hard to implement this idea. But what about
Speaker 1: other ideas of how to deal with nuclear waste? What
Speaker 1: about just crammin it ne garage somewhere. Well, that's what
Speaker 1: we're doing right now. Then that, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: is not necessarily a long term solution. Uh. And while
Speaker 1: I am being facetious by saying that's what we're doing
Speaker 1: right now. What we are doing right now is not
Speaker 1: that far from cramming it into a garage. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like a really nice garage. It's a garage that
Speaker 1: was meant to hold nuclear waste, but not indefinitely. It
Speaker 1: was meant to hold it for you know, three decades. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, long term above ground storage that was investigated
Speaker 1: by a lot of countries, including the United States, and
Speaker 1: and was eventually said, you know, this is not a
Speaker 1: good idea. It's just not safe enough. It's not uh,
Speaker 1: it's not a permanent solution. It's intermediate at best, so
Speaker 1: we need something else. In fact, the United States looked
Speaker 1: into it as being a potential long term solution and
Speaker 1: then said, yeah, we gotta find a different way. So
Speaker 1: that's off the table. Okay, what about this idea of reprocessing.
Speaker 1: This has come up before that. Apparently some countries reprocess
Speaker 1: spent nuclear fuel to see what they can do with it. Now,
Speaker 1: is this something that's going to get rid of the
Speaker 1: high level waste problem? Absolutely not. This is what generates
Speaker 1: high level waste. Okay, how does it do that? So
Speaker 1: you've got the spent nuclear fuel? Uh? And we mentioned
Speaker 1: before that when you use nuclear fuel, you only use
Speaker 1: up about two percent of it, especially in solid nuclear fuel.
Speaker 1: There are different types of reactors, Like if you were
Speaker 1: using liquid nuclear fuel, it's a different thing, but your
Speaker 1: standards solid nuclear rod, you use up about two percent
Speaker 1: of the fuel and the other remains unburned, which means
Speaker 1: that you know, if you're just gonna toss that, you're
Speaker 1: you're losing. Yeah. Now, the thing is that uranium is
Speaker 1: actually not that expensive compared to the process of reprocessing uranium.
Speaker 1: So if it's cheaper to buy new uranium than it
Speaker 1: is to reprocess the stuff you've already used, guess what
Speaker 1: people do. They buy new uranium because there's no incentive
Speaker 1: to reprocess the stuff you already have if it's more
Speaker 1: expensive than just going out and buying the new stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: around the late two thousand's, the price of uranium started
Speaker 1: to climb and that caused a lot of countries to
Speaker 1: look into this reprocessing uh technique, which means they try
Speaker 1: to reclaim as much of the uranium and plutonium that
Speaker 1: still exists in that nuclear fuel as possible, And about
Speaker 1: of it is uranium and about another percent is plutonium,
Speaker 1: and the remaining three is this stuff they can't use.
Speaker 1: That's the high level waste that we've been talking about.
Speaker 1: That's the stuff that's really dangerous, and it's gonna be
Speaker 1: dangerous for a long long time. So we've got to
Speaker 1: figure out what to do. So even if you do
Speaker 1: reprocess it so that you can use the stuff again
Speaker 1: in some other nuclear fuel reaction, whatever that may be,
Speaker 1: you still at the end of the day have stuff
Speaker 1: left over that you have to figure out what are
Speaker 1: you gonna do with it. So it's not it's not
Speaker 1: a solution of getting rid of nuclear waste. Um, it's
Speaker 1: just how do you keep on using the stuff you've
Speaker 1: got for as long as you can, uh, rather than
Speaker 1: buying new uranium? So not not a not a long
Speaker 1: term solution, and it and it doesn't completely solve the problem,
Speaker 1: and not at all. No, you still have the problem
Speaker 1: of the high level waste. And eventually, you know, eventually
Speaker 1: you're going to get to a point where it will
Speaker 1: cost more to reprocess whatever fuel you have than to
Speaker 1: just go out and get new stuff, unless you're somehow
Speaker 1: re enriching it and recombining it with other reprocessed fuels.
Speaker 1: Unless there were regulations that were forcing companies to do this,
Speaker 1: it might not be anyone would choose to do right,
Speaker 1: and ultimately it's not a big environmental improvement over just
Speaker 1: storing spent nuclear fuel in pools, which is what we're
Speaker 1: doing right now. We're keeping them in pools for fifty
Speaker 1: years before we can do anything else with it. Well,
Speaker 1: I have a different solution that involves putting nuclear waste
Speaker 1: in waters. What's that, It's called quote disposal. Let's see
Speaker 1: a k A. Dumping radioactive waste directly into the ocean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's not like there's anything going on, and it's
Speaker 1: not like there are complex ecosystems or worldwide movements of
Speaker 1: large trade winds, giant currents that could carry nuclear particles
Speaker 1: thousands of miles onto the shores of distance. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: let's back off now. Surely nobody would actually do this, right,
Speaker 1: It's just one of those. Clearly, this is crazy and
Speaker 1: no one would ever do nobody except like a dozen
Speaker 1: different countries including the United States, Russia and the former
Speaker 1: Soviet Union and the UK, Japan and a bunch of
Speaker 1: other European countries. Uh, there are there are dump sites
Speaker 1: in the oceans all over the world. Now here's the
Speaker 1: here's the big thing to keep in mind, as far
Speaker 1: as we know, it's not like people have been dumping
Speaker 1: high level waste into the ocean. This is a dump.
Speaker 1: They've been dumping intermediate and low level waste into the ocean. Still,
Speaker 1: there were decades when this was done, decades if people
Speaker 1: began to get increasingly uncomfortable over time. So since the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, international agreements have banned dumping radioactive waste into
Speaker 1: the ocean. But so we we've been doing this since
Speaker 1: what like the sixties that I think since the forties maybe,
Speaker 1: and then it wasn't until the nineties that we all
Speaker 1: got it together to be offended by. We had a
Speaker 1: lot going on in the eighties. Um, there was like
Speaker 1: a lot going on that you aren't aware of. I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean, I was was teaching America how to laugh
Speaker 1: on Saturday Night Live, I believe you. And the DVR
Speaker 1: didn't even exist yet, so you had to watch that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is uh so it seems crazy to me even
Speaker 1: though this is so. We are talking about lower level wastes,
Speaker 1: but it's not that incredibly dangerous high level waste. If
Speaker 1: they were doing that, that would be absolutely insane. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this lower level waste. Supposedly, from what I've read, most
Speaker 1: authorities have said it's probably not really dangerous. It's probably
Speaker 1: not significantly harming ecosystems because it's contained and it's the
Speaker 1: lower level waste. The water is a very good shield
Speaker 1: against radiation. You know, you have to have several You
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to get right next to any sort of
Speaker 1: radioactive source, even in the water, but ten meters away
Speaker 1: it's a you know, if there's ten meters of water
Speaker 1: around this radioactive stuff, then it's a very good shielding
Speaker 1: unit for it would away in air. Yes, So it's uh,
Speaker 1: you know, there's that to consider as well. Depending upon
Speaker 1: the dumping site, there could be a minimal impact on
Speaker 1: certain ecosystems. But it's still something that I would be
Speaker 1: very much not happy with, especially if I were, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know someone who actually came across one of
Speaker 1: these things, but that's never happened, right, Speaking of that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I read in an article in the Wall Street Journal
Speaker 1: this wonderful paragraph quote. Commercial fishermen have at times hauled
Speaker 1: up waste containers from various parts of the Massachusetts Bay
Speaker 1: home to a dump site. Frank Mirarchi, a seventy year
Speaker 1: old retired commercial fisherman said his catches occasionally included nuclear
Speaker 1: junk containers. After one such discovery, Mr Mirarchi said government
Speaker 1: officials checked him and his crew for radiation but didn't
Speaker 1: find problems. Comforting. It's so once again, I do want
Speaker 1: to remind you, it's not it's not like that they're
Speaker 1: dumping the high level waste. It could be a lot worse.
Speaker 1: And they're not not dumping anything now yeah yeah, yeah, right, right,
Speaker 1: but just previously dumping the high level waste probably well,
Speaker 1: it's far as we know. I'm I mean, honestly, I
Speaker 1: don't know what the Soviet Union was doing, but I'm
Speaker 1: not sure even the Soviet Union was aware of what
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union was doing. That part of the problem.
Speaker 1: It's the former Soviet Union. Yeah, But in any case,
Speaker 1: so it's not like we've got high level way strolling
Speaker 1: around in the ocean as far as we know. But
Speaker 1: still bad idea, don't ever do that again, humans, Just
Speaker 1: that still please dispose of the stuff properly. And why
Speaker 1: that seems to be the wide agreement. You know that
Speaker 1: the nations around the world have said, you know what,
Speaker 1: you're right, are bad. We won't do that anymore. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So let's look at another alternative. How about really really
Speaker 1: deep holes in the ground. So when we talk about
Speaker 1: stuff like yuck A Mountain, there you're talking about going
Speaker 1: down like a thousand feet yeah, three of rock. So
Speaker 1: the ideal thing about yucka Mountain is that it was
Speaker 1: supposed to be like under three of rock, but also
Speaker 1: three above the water table. So it's not going to
Speaker 1: be leaking into the groundwater that you're going to pull
Speaker 1: up in your well or that's going to get into
Speaker 1: the ecosystem, and it's going to be really far separated
Speaker 1: from the surface. But you could actually if you weren't
Speaker 1: trying to hollow out a full facility with large storage
Speaker 1: spaces and stuff like that, you could probably go a
Speaker 1: lot deeper. Right sure, I think you're you're dancing around
Speaker 1: a bore hole. There. A bore hole indeed where you
Speaker 1: you bore a hole into the earth which doesn't involve
Speaker 1: speaking like you know, ben Stein at the ground or anything,
Speaker 1: and actually involves drilling. Instead of like three d or
Speaker 1: a thousand feet, this would be in terms of kilometers deep,
Speaker 1: so like maybe two to five kilometers below the surface,
Speaker 1: which is not unprecedented we have drilled as far down
Speaker 1: as six kilometers for things like oil. So if we
Speaker 1: were to identify appropriate areas where the strata UH were
Speaker 1: amenable to the kind of things we need to do,
Speaker 1: like dump nuclear waste down it, you can totally do that.
Speaker 1: You could, at least in theory, bore a hole really
Speaker 1: far down, lower the nuclear waste into it, sometimes between
Speaker 1: depending upon the type of hole. We've seen estimates between
Speaker 1: a hundred and two hundred metric tons could fit in
Speaker 1: a single borehole. And you're you're not just gonna just
Speaker 1: gonna plunk it in there, like you know, lowering it
Speaker 1: would be the best thing. You just drop it. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't think so. I would consider one
Speaker 1: of the one of the big concerns. I'm jumping ahead here,
Speaker 1: but one of the big concerns is that what happens
Speaker 1: if nuclear waste were to get caught on the way down,
Speaker 1: Like you're you're lowering containers and you're not just pouring
Speaker 1: out green glowing sludge teenage midget total style into it,
Speaker 1: but you're lowering containers down, and if it were to
Speaker 1: get stuck on something on the way down, then it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be at the appropriate depth the agreed upon death
Speaker 1: Like this is all based upon estimations of how long
Speaker 1: will this place remain safe because we need a long
Speaker 1: term solution. Oh yeah, and also, I mean you're you're
Speaker 1: going to be dropping casks, are lowering casks. It's it's
Speaker 1: all going to be very well protected. I'm sure before
Speaker 1: it even gets to the boreholes. Yeah, so you get
Speaker 1: down you lower it down there, about a hundred to
Speaker 1: two hundred metric tons of spent nuclear fuel could go
Speaker 1: down there. The U S generates at least two thousand
Speaker 1: metric tons of this a year. Yeah, there's uh so,
Speaker 1: the Nuclear Energy Institute estimates that we produce between about
Speaker 1: two thousand and metric tons of spent nuclear fuel per year.
Speaker 1: But that is just the spent nuclear fuel, that is
Speaker 1: not all of the high level waste, right, and then yeah,
Speaker 1: when you're talking about high level waste, you're talking more
Speaker 1: like seven thousand metric tons per year. So anyway, for
Speaker 1: just the spent nuclear fuel, you would need ten to
Speaker 1: twenty bore holes every year to meet that demand. So
Speaker 1: you have to you'd have to dig between ten and
Speaker 1: twenty every single year to do this kilometers down and
Speaker 1: then for the high level waste, you're talking thirty five
Speaker 1: to seventy additional ones to handle all that stuff. Um,
Speaker 1: And there are some big concerns, Like I said, what
Speaker 1: happens if it gets stuck on the way down it's
Speaker 1: not the right depth, and that's a problem. How do
Speaker 1: you how do you unstick it safely so that you
Speaker 1: can lower it all the way to the base. Another
Speaker 1: is that you have to develop an appropriate seal for
Speaker 1: the top of this borehole so that it is sealed properly.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna let any any particulates out, and it's
Speaker 1: not gonna easily let anyone else into it, whether on
Speaker 1: accident or by design. Um. You know, you have to
Speaker 1: make sure that the well casing is really strong so
Speaker 1: that it can withstand any kind of shifting. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously you know the ground does tend to shift every
Speaker 1: now and again. You don't want to put these anywhere
Speaker 1: close to uh an area that has a lot of
Speaker 1: earthquake activity, or any earthquake activity. Um. You have to
Speaker 1: be really careful about groundwater again, knowing that any sort
Speaker 1: of high level waste that's generating heat could cause groundwater
Speaker 1: to start to swell. Out of the ground. That's a
Speaker 1: big issue because that's gonna alter an ecosystem. Even if
Speaker 1: there's no radiation leakage, it changes the eCos tom itself.
Speaker 1: So one of the other issues with boreholes is that theoretically,
Speaker 1: if you were to use a geological repository, you could
Speaker 1: design in such a way that should we come up
Speaker 1: with a technology where spent nuclear fuel would be a
Speaker 1: great resource to have, you could go and retrieve it.
Speaker 1: Not so much with bore holes. Nope. Yeah, so that
Speaker 1: would be another potential downside. Now, granted, this is saying
Speaker 1: it's a potential downside in the future which may or
Speaker 1: may not ever come up with a great way to
Speaker 1: use spent nuclear fuel. So you're like, well, okay, but
Speaker 1: we that doesn't solve the problem we have right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't as a global population want to be that
Speaker 1: that person who just hoards craft materials that they might
Speaker 1: never use again, except those craft materials could totally kill you. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: have the world's most dangerous junk drawer. Yeah, I see
Speaker 1: where you're going to that. Okay, but surely there are
Speaker 1: other wonderful ways we could cram nuclear waste into the
Speaker 1: Earth's crust. There are other ways, and don't copy surely,
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry. Okay, how about rock melting? Rock melting?
Speaker 1: It sounds like a B fift two song, but it
Speaker 1: totally isn't. Um rock melting. Yeah, awesome, fantastic. I'm not
Speaker 1: participating in this. So the idea is to melt wastes
Speaker 1: into adjacent rock to create eventually a solid mass that's
Speaker 1: radioactively stable. So think of it this way. You've got
Speaker 1: these casks of radioactive material that heat up pretty hot,
Speaker 1: you know, especially if you've got a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: them together and you put them in an area where
Speaker 1: they're surrounded by rocks. They eventually heat the rocks up
Speaker 1: to molten status, and the rocks end up kind of
Speaker 1: and end up being this gooey thing all around them.
Speaker 1: You've got molten radioactive lava essentially, but as it cools,
Speaker 1: it solidifies, and that radioactive material would in theory be
Speaker 1: fairly uniformly dispersed throughout that solid mass. So instead of
Speaker 1: this concentrate did radioactive source, you have a more dispersed
Speaker 1: radioactive source that isn't as dangerous over time, and it's
Speaker 1: also again deep underground. When you do this, you don't
Speaker 1: just pour it out over rocks on the ground. That
Speaker 1: also somehow sounds like it would be less likely to
Speaker 1: get back out, like if it's incorporated into the rock structure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't be able to get back at the stuff
Speaker 1: easily in a way that it's again, it's a way
Speaker 1: where you're if you were to use this method, you're
Speaker 1: not going to be using that for fuel again anytime
Speaker 1: in the foreseeable future. Russian scientists even proposed digging a
Speaker 1: deep borehole and then putting plutonium in it and then
Speaker 1: immobilizing it through the sound use of nuclear explosions. Finally, yeah,
Speaker 1: the way to put bomba under the earth. But after
Speaker 1: much discussion, it turns out they thought this was a
Speaker 1: crazy idea because it who knows what it could do
Speaker 1: to the surrounding environment and water table if you were
Speaker 1: to detonate a nuclear reaction just to a mobile ice
Speaker 1: some nuclear waste underground. So um, it was considered eventually
Speaker 1: to be what they call a bad idea and didn't
Speaker 1: didn't pursue it. Well, I've got a bad idea that
Speaker 1: might be even worse. What if you did pretty much
Speaker 1: the same thing but with ice instead. Of rock. So
Speaker 1: you put a big, old hot container of radioactive sludge
Speaker 1: on top of an ice sheet and just let it
Speaker 1: melt straight like ice cube glacier or something like those
Speaker 1: things that we're already having a huge problem with melting.
Speaker 1: It becomes in sino man and uh to be as
Speaker 1: bad to let out of the ice. To be fair,
Speaker 1: a lot of these discussions of using ice sheets happened
Speaker 1: before we had some major major problems with ice sheets
Speaker 1: receding so or at least before they became as noticeable
Speaker 1: as they are now. The idea was that you would
Speaker 1: put these things on the ice, they would melt a
Speaker 1: hole through and just start boring down into the ice sheet,
Speaker 1: and then eventually the ice would reform on top of
Speaker 1: that hole. So you would have a solid barrier of
Speaker 1: ice all around this radioactive material. And as we've discussed,
Speaker 1: water is really good at shielding from radiation. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: international treaties pretty much mean that that is off the table.
Speaker 1: For one thing, most countries wouldn't have access to this directly.
Speaker 1: They'd have to treaty with some other country that does
Speaker 1: have access to it and be able, you know, to
Speaker 1: to dump their nuclear waste in another country that's not
Speaker 1: likely to happen. Countries don't tend to be too hot
Speaker 1: on the idea of yeah, bring us all the stuff
Speaker 1: that you're afraid is going to kill you, and will
Speaker 1: totally hold on to it for you. And even if
Speaker 1: you found a country neutral place, I mean, is an
Speaker 1: Antarctica a scientific yeah place? Yeah, we could just scrap
Speaker 1: all of the scientific and debtors going on down there. Yea,
Speaker 1: there's some treaties that prevent us from doing ok yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but the same sort of idea, the idea that you know,
Speaker 1: we could in theory put it there, except for the
Speaker 1: fact that most countries have signed treaties saying we totally
Speaker 1: won't do that because we all agree that that's probably
Speaker 1: not the best idea, it's not the best use of
Speaker 1: the area. No, no, just the fact that it's for
Speaker 1: public use. That's kind of like saying, because we can't
Speaker 1: dump trash in our front yard, maybe we should just
Speaker 1: go dump it in the street. Or really it's in
Speaker 1: the yards of those other people over there because they
Speaker 1: moved away, and who knows who cares, Let's just put
Speaker 1: it all on that vacant lot. Okay, Okay, Well, I
Speaker 1: think what about a better idea. Now we have talked before.
Speaker 1: We won't really focus on it today because we've done
Speaker 1: a whole podcast on it before, but the idea of
Speaker 1: like thorium reactors and waste reclaiming nuclear reactors, there are
Speaker 1: certain proposals for types of nuclear energy that could use
Speaker 1: up some of this stuff that currently becomes waste, which
Speaker 1: I think is a brilliant idea if if we can
Speaker 1: make it practical. Yeah, and as long as you can
Speaker 1: make it where again you're getting more energy out of
Speaker 1: the deal than it took to make the deal possible.
Speaker 1: Even if that's a long term prospect, then that's that's
Speaker 1: something we should look into. What about this idea of remediation, Well,
Speaker 1: remediation is one of those fields that scientists researchers are
Speaker 1: looking into as a possible way of dealing with nuclear waste,
Speaker 1: including using stuff like microbes or metal sulfides, transmutation methods,
Speaker 1: bringing old alchemy into the nuclear age. But the whole
Speaker 1: idea is just to decrease the radioactivity of nuclear waste.
Speaker 1: But the thing is, we don't know if any of
Speaker 1: those methods are ever going to be scalable, if we'll
Speaker 1: ever be able to deal with more than just minute traces.
Speaker 1: It may be that in the lab, sure this method
Speaker 1: works great for this tiny amount of radioactive material, but
Speaker 1: if you're talking about the material produced by an entire
Speaker 1: nuclear plant over the course of a year, there may
Speaker 1: not be any practical way of using these methods to
Speaker 1: deal with that amount of waste. And even if it's practical,
Speaker 1: it may not in the sense of it works. It
Speaker 1: may not be practical from an energy or monetary source
Speaker 1: if it costs more energy for you to do than
Speaker 1: some other method. Yeah, yeah, okay, So I think what
Speaker 1: all of this is leading up to is the basic
Speaker 1: fact that we don't even want this on our planet.
Speaker 1: This is not There is no good place that is
Speaker 1: entirely safe for us to put nuclear waste, not that
Speaker 1: we can access anyway, right right, Well, I guess we
Speaker 1: could put it into the core, but you can't really
Speaker 1: get there. If there was only like a little hatch
Speaker 1: straight to the core, we had some kind of Jewels
Speaker 1: Burne style machine for that, then that would be terrific.
Speaker 1: But why don't we just shoot it into space? Y'all?
Speaker 1: This is the internet comment or solution. Shot Yeah, blasted it,
Speaker 1: blow it out the airlock. Same thing for trash, right,
Speaker 1: that was the same thing. I was like, why don't
Speaker 1: we just like get rid of the landfills by attaching
Speaker 1: it to like a giant net to a rocket just
Speaker 1: aimed that sucker at the Sun and say, Sionara, Man, yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't make sense to shoot it into space. The
Speaker 1: answer is no, it does no, no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 1: Joe pray tell why does it not make sense? Well?
Speaker 1: I just decided to gather a few basic facts and
Speaker 1: then do some depressing math, and now we bring you
Speaker 1: the popular forward thinking segment depressing math. Okay, so, first
Speaker 1: of all, space launches are very very expensive, so cost
Speaker 1: per pound is going to vary with every launch, and
Speaker 1: so different rockets will have have different expenses. But the
Speaker 1: older commonly cited figure is that on average, it costs
Speaker 1: NASA about ten thousand bucks per pound to take cargo
Speaker 1: from the surface of the Earth to low Earth orbit. Okay,
Speaker 1: so in the near future that average might change. It's
Speaker 1: probably going to be different. We don't know exactly what
Speaker 1: the number is going to be, so maybe we imagine
Speaker 1: with the advent of private space launches, it'll get a
Speaker 1: lot lower. Suffice to say that it's still gonna be
Speaker 1: really high cost. So take whatever low ball option you want,
Speaker 1: and let's say, for to have some contrast, maybe they'll
Speaker 1: cut it in half to five thousand dollars a pound.
Speaker 1: I think that might be very optimistic, but we don't know.
Speaker 1: So the nuclear industry produces about two thousand metric tons
Speaker 1: of spent nuclear fuel per year, according to the Nuclear
Speaker 1: Energy Institute, and they are a nuclear industry lobbying groups.
Speaker 1: So I think it's a good idea to suspect that
Speaker 1: these figures might be conservative. And this is just for
Speaker 1: the United States, right, Yes, So metric tons is about
Speaker 1: five million, seventy thousand pounds. Multiply that by ten thousand
Speaker 1: dollars per pound, and it's fifty point seven billion dollars
Speaker 1: a year in launch costs. And that's just launching. That's
Speaker 1: not counting the transportation of getting the waste to the
Speaker 1: launch site, or what we do with it once it's
Speaker 1: in space, or even developing the right kind of capsule
Speaker 1: to carry the stuff in the first place. Right, right, Right,
Speaker 1: So if you want to be much more optimistic and
Speaker 1: assume the launch costs of five thousand dollars per pound,
Speaker 1: that's still twenty five point or billion dollars. And that's
Speaker 1: just the spent nuclear fuel. Okay, well, what about high
Speaker 1: level waste? And so if you assume there you're talking
Speaker 1: about a number something like seven thousand metric tons a year,
Speaker 1: that's about fifteen point four million pounds. So to ship
Speaker 1: that into space at ten thousand per pound to be
Speaker 1: a hundred and fifty four billion dollars a year at
Speaker 1: five thousand and be seventy seven billion dollars every year.
Speaker 1: And keep in mind also this is just the new
Speaker 1: spent nuclear fuel and high level waste that we're producing
Speaker 1: every year, not counting all the stuff we've already got
Speaker 1: sitting there. Can we afford not to shoot it into space?
Speaker 1: I want to say one more thing, hold on, that's
Speaker 1: also just talking about low Earth orbit. To send something
Speaker 1: farther away than low Earth orbit, like to say, shoot
Speaker 1: it into the Sun as some people have imagined, which actually,
Speaker 1: if you're going to shoot it into space, that's probably
Speaker 1: one of the best places to send it. You don't
Speaker 1: really want to keep it in low Earth orbit with
Speaker 1: the potential for it to have orbit decay and fall
Speaker 1: right back to Earth, right, so you want to take
Speaker 1: it to the Sun, like like Superman did with nuclear
Speaker 1: weapons in Superman for the Quest for Peace, one of
Speaker 1: our favorite shows to reference on Fantastic documentary, one of
Speaker 1: our favorite movies here. Uh, it would cost even more,
Speaker 1: I mean a lot more. Typically fuel costs to get
Speaker 1: it out there. It'll take something to like to geosynchronous orbit,
Speaker 1: costs a lot more than he wants. You get out
Speaker 1: of the travitational pull of Earth. You really just need
Speaker 1: a little thrust and then it'll just it'll just go.
Speaker 1: You know. Well that way, the costs of rocket launches
Speaker 1: aren't just in the fuel. I mean, that's a lot
Speaker 1: of it, but a lot of it's got to be
Speaker 1: in in designing this capsule and stuff like that. So
Speaker 1: the even more important issue is that even if we
Speaker 1: were to have unlimited money to blast this stuff into space,
Speaker 1: the bigger concern is what happens if there's a critical
Speaker 1: launch failure on a vehicle that is carrying high level
Speaker 1: nuclear waste. Yeah. We The sad fact about the space
Speaker 1: industry is that it hasn't gone off without a hitch.
Speaker 1: There is a long history of failures. Some catastrophe in
Speaker 1: nature somewhere tragically people lost their lives as a result,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's it's just a it's a fact
Speaker 1: that things that we build will not always work exactly
Speaker 1: as we had intended all the time, right, So it
Speaker 1: is a very horrible tragedy when there's a launch failure
Speaker 1: and astronauts lose their lives. It would be so much
Speaker 1: worse even to not only have astronauts lose their lives,
Speaker 1: but to have high level nuclear waste raining down over
Speaker 1: the surface of the Earth from the atmosphere. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that that's just horrible scenario. Well, I mean, we
Speaker 1: talked about the not in my backyard problem with the
Speaker 1: the geological repositories. Can you imagine the reaction of people
Speaker 1: who live near launch sites if it were made public
Speaker 1: that we are going to attempt to launch nuclear waste
Speaker 1: into space. This place where tragedy has struck before, could
Speaker 1: potentially become ground zero for high level waste raining down here.
Speaker 1: And even if you could, you know, material science your
Speaker 1: way into a container that would absolutely be full proof
Speaker 1: against that kind of thing. That's a container that you're
Speaker 1: talking about shooting into the sun. And I'm sure it's
Speaker 1: not inexpensive to crank out. Yeah, it's not feasible for
Speaker 1: multiple reasons. It's it would be incredibly expensive, The risk
Speaker 1: would be astronomical, not to make too big of a
Speaker 1: space pun on it. Uh, and so it just it
Speaker 1: does not make sense if we had a magical teleport device, sure,
Speaker 1: but we don't have one of those. So we have
Speaker 1: to we have to deal with the problem here on Earth.
Speaker 1: So I guess that's not to say that at no
Speaker 1: point in the future of humanity will it ever be feasible,
Speaker 1: but you just have to. It would take a lot
Speaker 1: to get there. It have to be much more economically
Speaker 1: feasible to take stuff to orbit. You'd have to have
Speaker 1: a very very safe way of transporting cargo from the
Speaker 1: surface to orbit, and right now we have nothing like that.
Speaker 1: All that being said, the United States did actually look
Speaker 1: into this as a potential way, not necessarily, you know,
Speaker 1: throwing all their chips into it. They're just like, well,
Speaker 1: does this make sense? Had somebody write up a report?
Speaker 1: I guess yeah. There probably was just a big response
Speaker 1: to just said nope. So they didn't go with the idea. No,
Speaker 1: they did not. As a quick fix, something a little
Speaker 1: bit more down to earth has been proposed, And sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry I couldn't be great ahead. Some people are
Speaker 1: proposing two and fifty years sites for storing this kind
Speaker 1: of waste. Yeah, I think that's a much better idea. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and you know, and in response, some people have said, well,
Speaker 1: what about the real sites like yuck A Mountain And
Speaker 1: I mean, okay, look, you guys, currently the uck A
Speaker 1: Mountain project dot gov website is a time stamp. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it literally just gives you the time stamps. Nothing. They're
Speaker 1: not even a few under construction gifts, right, don't even
Speaker 1: have a looping midi of something playing in the background.
Speaker 1: I think we should write them and to their non
Speaker 1: existing email address and let them know about this. But
Speaker 1: the problems with these two hundred and fifty year sites
Speaker 1: are that, I mean, basically, they're only good for two
Speaker 1: fifty years. That's not actually that's really only delaying the
Speaker 1: problem for a very short period of time globally speaking.
Speaker 1: And you're still incurring the expense of building these sites
Speaker 1: and transporting all of this waste over to them, which,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned before, is not really easy or simple. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean, we do already do quite a bit of it.
Speaker 1: According to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we already have
Speaker 1: some three million packages of radioactive materials being shipped by highway, rail, air,
Speaker 1: and water around the United States every year, which is
Speaker 1: a lot. It seems like a whole bunch to me,
Speaker 1: especially considering that it's such an expensive sounding process that
Speaker 1: involves all of this shipping materials, testing, like every single
Speaker 1: container that is used has to be exposed to really
Speaker 1: stringent testing, and um furthermore, a lot of interdepartmental handshakes
Speaker 1: and paperwork, and furthermore, like armed escorts in the case
Speaker 1: have spent fuel going through populated areas. All all kinds
Speaker 1: of considerations are taken. Now, I will say that I've
Speaker 1: seen some people propose that we go with the two
Speaker 1: fifty year route, working toward making facilities that would be
Speaker 1: strong enough to go much longer than that, Like I
Speaker 1: like a rent to own option. Yeah, The idea being
Speaker 1: that it's a lot easier to sell the idea of
Speaker 1: two d fifty years because you actually have to build
Speaker 1: in stuff like budget, right, you have to budget for
Speaker 1: a facility that can be with can withstand this for
Speaker 1: two hud fifty years. If you design something that can
Speaker 1: actually last ten thousand years, but you sell it as
Speaker 1: two d fifty years, then suddenly you have something that's
Speaker 1: easier to work around when you're talking about numbers and
Speaker 1: spreadsheets and budgets. I know that sounds crazy, It sounds
Speaker 1: insane that it all comes down to moving some figures
Speaker 1: around on a spreadsheet to make sure that you can
Speaker 1: pay for the thing that you need. But ultimately, that's
Speaker 1: the reality we live in. So it is possible that
Speaker 1: just by reframing a repository as saying this is a
Speaker 1: two and fifty year solution rather than a ten thousand
Speaker 1: year solution, you make get a more likely reality. That's
Speaker 1: something someone will be all right, well, I can I
Speaker 1: can wrap my head around that. When you give me
Speaker 1: a number like ten thousand years, it's so long that
Speaker 1: I just my reaction is just immediately to go on
Speaker 1: the defensive two or fifty years. Although it's well beyond
Speaker 1: the expected lifespan of anyone living today, barring any miraculous
Speaker 1: discoveries in one form or another, I mean, singularity all aside,
Speaker 1: then it's something that's a little bit easier for us
Speaker 1: to comprehend. It's well, yeah, ten thousand years, you're talking about,
Speaker 1: that's that's going into prehistoric time. If we ten thousand
Speaker 1: years back. That's like the beginning of agriculture, basically the
Speaker 1: two d fifty years. Then you're like, oh, okay, I
Speaker 1: know in general what people were like two fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: Years in the future, is it's going to be like
Speaker 1: floating skateboards. Yeah, yeah, actually that's next year. They won't
Speaker 1: technically be skate boards, will they know? They'll be hoverboards?
Speaker 1: Right yeah, coming to your fact straight, Lauren, I mean
Speaker 1: the next year. I think October next year actually, according
Speaker 1: to Back to the Future too. Oh nice, we'll have
Speaker 1: to look out for those, okay, okay. So I want
Speaker 1: to move the discussion onto one last consideration, which which
Speaker 1: I think is actually one of the most interesting questions. Um,
Speaker 1: let's say that we don't have a solution that's one
Speaker 1: of these sort of reprocessing or remediation solutions. One of
Speaker 1: the things that that takes the waste out of the picture.
Speaker 1: Assuming we have waste that's gonna be here to stay,
Speaker 1: how do we talk to the future to keep it safe? Right,
Speaker 1: So we'll say that, Um, I think would y'all agree
Speaker 1: that for now it seems like the standard answer. The
Speaker 1: deep geological repositories probably are the best solution currently more
Speaker 1: than all these alternatives, I think, out of all the
Speaker 1: ones that have been proposed, they are they make the
Speaker 1: most sense. Okay, yeah, I would probably agree. So imagine
Speaker 1: you've got a facility that's a deep geological repository. It's
Speaker 1: a place where deep under the ground there is a
Speaker 1: bunch of buried, very dangerous waste, and it's going to
Speaker 1: be dangerous, long long, long after year gone ten thousand
Speaker 1: years in the future, maybe even a hundred thousand years
Speaker 1: in the future. How do you communicate that fact to
Speaker 1: the future. Actually, uh so, one of my favorite other
Speaker 1: podcasts did a great episode about this. It's a podcast
Speaker 1: called Invisible and so if you're a fan of our show,
Speaker 1: you should also check them out. Um they did in
Speaker 1: an episode I think it was called ten thousand Years,
Speaker 1: and they look into exactly this problem in the episode,
Speaker 1: and I just really liked it a lot. I like
Speaker 1: them so much. I really think, all you should go
Speaker 1: check it out. So I wanted to give them a
Speaker 1: shout out. And they focused on the idea that at
Speaker 1: the place we talked about earlier, the waste isolation pilot plant,
Speaker 1: the whip facility, there was a project to study exactly
Speaker 1: this problem of how to communicate the danger of a
Speaker 1: nuclear waste storage facility two people far far in the future,
Speaker 1: when you can't anticipate what sort of language they will
Speaker 1: be using, how they'll be communicating. How do how do
Speaker 1: you communicate something when you have no clue what the
Speaker 1: those people are going to use as a basis for communication.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're talking to people ten thousand years
Speaker 1: in the future, you're basically talking to aliens. I mean
Speaker 1: they there is no guarantee they'll speak any language that's
Speaker 1: on Earth today. There's no guarantee that they will share
Speaker 1: our cultural knowledge, so they might not even understand the
Speaker 1: same symbols we have to. I like the part, and
Speaker 1: this was in the podcast. You definitely should listen to
Speaker 1: that that episode because it was very informative and entertaining.
Speaker 1: I like the part where they talked about how people
Speaker 1: gravitate towards the skull and crossbones as a warning, saying,
Speaker 1: you know, that's like poison, danger, pirates, etcetera, things that
Speaker 1: you don't necessarily want to encounter. Keep in mind, folks,
Speaker 1: not all pirates, like Johnny Depp. In fact, I think
Speaker 1: none of them did um So you know, It's one
Speaker 1: of those one of those things where said, well this
Speaker 1: is this is clearly going to be that kind of warning,
Speaker 1: except that if you look around today, you see lots
Speaker 1: of skull and crossbones on stuff like kissing boards. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my wife has a sweater with one that has a
Speaker 1: little pink bow on it. Um. You know. It's these
Speaker 1: are things that we have perhaps diluted its meaning. So
Speaker 1: in other words, we cannot count on a culture thinking
Speaker 1: of skull and crossbones is any kind of warning they
Speaker 1: might think, Oh wow, this is where the hot topics started.
Speaker 1: One thing I thought about is that the nuclear symbol,
Speaker 1: we expect that should continue to have meaning for all ages. Now,
Speaker 1: how many novelty items have you seen with the nuclear
Speaker 1: symbol on them? Again? Yeah, we have perhaps diluted that
Speaker 1: that so yeah, so uh. In this other podcast they
Speaker 1: talk a lot about the the signs and the symbols
Speaker 1: and how to communicate that in sort of these visual warnings.
Speaker 1: But I wanted to focus on something else, something else
Speaker 1: the Whip Project studied, which was trying to create landscapes
Speaker 1: that would themselves discourage people from coming near them. So
Speaker 1: sort of this landscape engineering what I would call stay
Speaker 1: away scapes. Right. Um, that seemed like a really interesting
Speaker 1: idea to me because that might rely less on people
Speaker 1: being able to understand the messages you're sending through text
Speaker 1: or through pictures. So you're purposefully making the landscape foreboding
Speaker 1: and and uh, trying to communicate the idea of this
Speaker 1: a bad place without knowing what the cultural ideas of
Speaker 1: good and bad are going to be in ten thousand years.
Speaker 1: Just try and make it so that any reasonable person
Speaker 1: would look at that and say, yeah, not going there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so let's let's just put ourselves in the space and
Speaker 1: try to imagine what you would have to do. So
Speaker 1: you've got an area of land, and you need to
Speaker 1: put things there, and and they're gonna have to have
Speaker 1: a lot of qualities. Like one of the qualities those
Speaker 1: items you put in the place need to have is
Speaker 1: that they make the message clear, like they say stay
Speaker 1: away very clearly. They have to be able to last
Speaker 1: as long as the facility is gonna lie exactly, and
Speaker 1: if that's going to be ten thousand years or even
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand years, I mean, what on earth? It's
Speaker 1: like impossibly sturdy material, right, they have to be something
Speaker 1: that's not going to be blown away by the wind.
Speaker 1: Or so let's just look around and all the stuff
Speaker 1: humans have built that have lasted for ten thousand, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean not much. Maybe some ancient megalithic st uture
Speaker 1: is at Malta, I guess, I mean not ten thousand.
Speaker 1: But now when you're going ten thousand, you're kind of
Speaker 1: looking at caves. It has to be able to, uh,
Speaker 1: to withstand the natural kind of removal and recycling process
Speaker 1: of the earth erosion and stuff. So a lot of
Speaker 1: the ideas that have been floated you might understand why
Speaker 1: their ideas for like gigantic stone monuments and stuff like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't think of ever a time in my life
Speaker 1: where I saw some sort of gigantic structure and thought,
Speaker 1: oh gosh, I totally don't want to get closer and
Speaker 1: see what the heck that thing is. That's exactly the
Speaker 1: next problem. You have to actually make sure that this
Speaker 1: thing is not attractive. So, like one of the ideas
Speaker 1: they mentioned is this landscape of thorns. Did y'all see
Speaker 1: the pictures on the whip site. Yeah, the pictures just
Speaker 1: made me think there's no way I would not want
Speaker 1: to go there. The idea behind it. So it was
Speaker 1: designed by one of the people this project contacted. They
Speaker 1: had this idea that you should have these scary looking
Speaker 1: spikes jutting up out of the earth to to communicate
Speaker 1: a sense of danger and foreboding, to make it look
Speaker 1: like a really scary place, you know, the the Valley
Speaker 1: of Thorns in a Disney movie. It looked to me
Speaker 1: like the landscape you would see in a Tim Burton
Speaker 1: film before he took a heat lamp to it and
Speaker 1: it formed all the little curly cueues. Yea, so pretty much. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: what it looked to me was like something that would
Speaker 1: make me think, Man, I gotta go check that out.
Speaker 1: It's like a playground. I want to go to there. Exactly.
Speaker 1: It's when you make things that are intentionally designed to
Speaker 1: look scary, they actually end up looking too interesting. Quality
Speaker 1: to that, Yeah, you'd have to figure out some way
Speaker 1: of making it less interesting. So maybe you make the
Speaker 1: most boring place, right, No one would want to go
Speaker 1: there as Also, what are these design elements created from,
Speaker 1: because there's the potential of people going like, this looks
Speaker 1: like a terrific recycling field exactly. That's exactly right. So
Speaker 1: you want to you don't want to make them out
Speaker 1: of anything that can be repurpose because people might show
Speaker 1: up in ten thousand years whatever and say, hey, you
Speaker 1: know that's a bunch of steel. I can make buildings
Speaker 1: out of steel. Let me get some of this and
Speaker 1: might as well build a building next to this place.
Speaker 1: So this creates a really difficult problem. How how do
Speaker 1: you achieve all of these different ideas? I mean, one
Speaker 1: idea I thought about was instead of having any kind
Speaker 1: of like spikes or interesting jutting features, would be to
Speaker 1: kind of try to create the most unfriendly but uninteresting
Speaker 1: landscape possible. So maybe just this landscape of really unclimbable
Speaker 1: rock rubble. Does that make any sense? Sure? I suppose
Speaker 1: so I was, I mean, with it with a barrier
Speaker 1: around it. I think it's really the barrier around it.
Speaker 1: If you have a whole lot of I mean at
Speaker 1: a safe distance, a whole lot of big blocks that
Speaker 1: have you know, human faces contorted in horror. But yet again,
Speaker 1: I would think that was interesting. And one thing you
Speaker 1: might notice is, uh so lots of ancient tombs and
Speaker 1: stuff like that are covered in warnings. You know, they
Speaker 1: have things on them that look like don't come in
Speaker 1: here because you will be tortured by evil spirits if
Speaker 1: you do. And what do people do? They go right
Speaker 1: on it, and that looks so cool. There's response to
Speaker 1: that is law's ancient Egypt. After after a few people
Speaker 1: go in to your nuclear waste site that has been
Speaker 1: warning that there are evil spirits here, they get sick
Speaker 1: and die, and then you get the growing folklore that indeed,
Speaker 1: evil spirits live there and we need to stay away.
Speaker 1: Well not, I mean, again, using ancient Egypt as a
Speaker 1: as an example, there are still to this day rumors
Speaker 1: that going into these ancient tombs of great warning, you know,
Speaker 1: there are still rumors that that will let evil spirits
Speaker 1: upon you. And then people have died. In my case,
Speaker 1: there'll there'll be a pile bodies. So but no, but
Speaker 1: you forget several things. I mean, number one, yeah, don't
Speaker 1: people still think Howard Carter was killed by the Mummy's curse? Uh?
Speaker 1: And then number two, the effects of radiation might be
Speaker 1: very slow acting. You might have people establish a community
Speaker 1: before they start getting all these problems, but the community
Speaker 1: dies out, and again you're just trying to emphasize your cruelty.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, I'm just saying that if if one
Speaker 1: small portion of humanity in ten thousand years has to die,
Speaker 1: so that the rest of humanity is aware that there,
Speaker 1: in fact is a terrible, terrible thing here that will
Speaker 1: cause harm due to the stupid decisions of of their ancestors. Okay,
Speaker 1: rather than how do we figure out a warning that
Speaker 1: will actually apply to them? I mean, ultimately it's going
Speaker 1: to be we don't have any way of knowing, right,
Speaker 1: there's no way for us to know buying buying the
Speaker 1: invention of a time machine. We cannot tell so ultimately,
Speaker 1: and also it's not really going to matter to any
Speaker 1: of us eventually, I mean not directly, it really isn't
Speaker 1: we have I think you're a terrible person, John, I'm
Speaker 1: not saying. I'm not saying we don't have a responsibility
Speaker 1: for future generations. We certainly do. I believe. However, not
Speaker 1: only are we not going to know about it, it's
Speaker 1: not going to matter to us by the time it
Speaker 1: actually ends up being a problem for them. But perhaps
Speaker 1: we should. We should task um, some someone I don't know,
Speaker 1: family or organization or whatever it is, to every year
Speaker 1: ago and an update in whatever the language is, or
Speaker 1: every decade or something like that, go up and update
Speaker 1: the stones and and be like inherited position to be
Speaker 1: the keeper of the stones and be like no for serious,
Speaker 1: We're like like, we'll kill you. Yeah, that's actually something
Speaker 1: like that is sort of part of the proposal they
Speaker 1: ended up with is the signs include requests for people
Speaker 1: in the future who come across the signs to make
Speaker 1: new copies of the signs that will withstand the elements.
Speaker 1: I think what they're saying like, if this is hard
Speaker 1: to read, please make a new copy. They just need
Speaker 1: to set up a speaker and a looping MP three
Speaker 1: of Slim Whitman's singing and that'll be enough. People just
Speaker 1: like I do not want to be here. And then
Speaker 1: they they yet another. So here's another idea I thought of.
Speaker 1: It's that better than my idea. It might be a
Speaker 1: little bit better than your ideas. I wondered if you
Speaker 1: could take advantage of natural landscapes on the Earth. For example,
Speaker 1: there are places on the planet Earth that you absolutely
Speaker 1: do not want to go, and they're bad in really
Speaker 1: uninteresting ways, like just the center of a desert where
Speaker 1: there's nothing there and nothing grows and no one settles,
Speaker 1: and it's just an utter waste land. I wonder if
Speaker 1: the best solution would be to do that now the
Speaker 1: I thought that for a moment, and then I thought
Speaker 1: to myself, We'll wait a minute, though. How long does
Speaker 1: it take a climb it to change? How can you
Speaker 1: predict what that landscape is going to look like in
Speaker 1: ten What if it's fertile land in a few thousand years?
Speaker 1: You know, I mean that's a long time. It's it's
Speaker 1: a long enough time for things to especially considering the
Speaker 1: rate of change right that it's hard to predict what
Speaker 1: is going to be an arid landscape, uh, ten thous
Speaker 1: years from now. I mean, it's tricky. So, as it
Speaker 1: turns out, this is a hard problem, and it's it's
Speaker 1: this is one of the reasons why it's taken us
Speaker 1: so long. Why why we've been running out the clock
Speaker 1: on the length of time the above ground facilities have
Speaker 1: been holding on to high level waste while we try
Speaker 1: to come up with a working, working solution for the
Speaker 1: permanent place of that stuff. Yeah, maybe what we really
Speaker 1: do need to do is start up it, start out
Speaker 1: some of these like two fifty year kind of facilities
Speaker 1: and sort of leave a memo to the future and
Speaker 1: be like, hey, we tried, yeah, and meanwhile we're still
Speaker 1: making this stuff. Sorry. This also is one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why I really hope that fusion ends up working
Speaker 1: out somewhere down the line, because it would produce far
Speaker 1: fewer dangerous byproducts than the fiscile version of nuclear power,
Speaker 1: or that any of the technologies to reclaim and repurpose
Speaker 1: some of the spent nuclear fuel. Yeah. Yeah, if it
Speaker 1: becomes a scalable, financially feasible method, than yes, that would
Speaker 1: also be a great benefit to humanity. Again, I think
Speaker 1: nuclear power the principles are are sound. It's just that
Speaker 1: the reality of what do you do with this nuclear
Speaker 1: waste is a real problem that we have to figure
Speaker 1: out how to solve. Um. Barring anyone finding that magic
Speaker 1: hatch to the core of the Earth, it's going to
Speaker 1: be one that's going to require some pretty difficult decisions.
Speaker 1: So it'll be something that I expect we'll see more
Speaker 1: about the within our lifetimes. Yeah. Well, I mean, in
Speaker 1: the meantime, get those geological facilities going. Yeah, if you can.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a lot of political pressure to not
Speaker 1: do that thing in any given place, but if it's
Speaker 1: at all. You know, if it's one of those things
Speaker 1: that can be done, it should be done because it
Speaker 1: does look like it's the best option out of all
Speaker 1: the ones that have been explored so far. So unless
Speaker 1: someone's come up with something brand new tomorrow, which would
Speaker 1: be wonderful. Um, I totally agree. If we can get
Speaker 1: some movement on the geological repository front, that would be awesome.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, that wraps up this discussion about you know,
Speaker 1: what do we do about this problem with nuclear waste?
Speaker 1: And obviously you know the the answers are tough, but
Speaker 1: they are ones that we need to tackle. So again,
Speaker 1: we need to concentrate on these problems. Otherwise there there's
Speaker 1: not a solution that's going to come up magically. We've
Speaker 1: got to act on this sort of thing. Uh. Anyway,
Speaker 1: if you guys have suggestions for future episodes of forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: you've got any ideas for something you definitely want to
Speaker 1: year in the future, let us know on Twitter, on Facebook,
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Speaker 1: f w Thinking and we will talk to you again
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