How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Waste

How dangerous is nuclear waste? What are we doing with it? What should we do with it? How long do I have to wait until I can cuddle with it and watch a movie together? Grab your geiger counter and jump into this cinematic journey to answer all the questions about with the world's most mysterious byproduct.

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CHAPTERS

00:00 Hanging out with nuclear waste
01:50 What is the high-level waste?
02:50 E=MC2
03:17 How deadly is used fuel when it comes out of the reactor?
04:02 Danger vs Risk: Why the waste has never killed anyone
06:47 The engineering of keeping us safe
08:19 How much waste is there?
09:34 Nuclear waste vs. waste of other electricity sources
11:37 How long is the waste dangerous for?
14:53 How long ’til you can safely cuddle with nuclear waste and watch a film?
17:24 Moving the waste from the plant to the burial site (DGR)
18:23 A visit to the giant waste hole (DGR)
21:49 Nuclear waste vs other toxic wastes
22:47 Is it waste or is it fuel?
24:58 An argument for NOT burying it.
26:24 You can fear it if you like, but you can’t say ‘there is no plan’
27:02 The Dutch Alternative
28:36 Conclusion + Credits


SHOW NOTES

OPG Nuclear Waste (Byproducts) Page
https://www.opg.com/powering-ontario/...

Dry Casks Weight and Other Info
http://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/waste/...

Computing Energy Density of a Fuel Pellet
https://whatisnuclear.com/energy-dens...

0.1% mass lost of U-235 in Fission (E=mc2 in action)
https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelv...

Some Physics on the Safety of Nuclear Waste
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/t...

How Much Waste Is There?
https://whatisnuclear.com/how-much-wa...

Kyle Hill: We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago
We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago

John Oliver: Nuclear Waste
Nuclear Waste: Last Week Tonight with...

Visualizing Carbon (explanation of image of CO2 in Manhattan)
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/...

How Much Nuclear Fuel is there on Earth?
https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sus...

Dark Side of Solar Power (Waste Version)
https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side...

Methyl Mercury Risk to Human Health from Hydro Dams
https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2016/11...

BI - Why Wind Blades Are So Hard to Recycle
Why Wind Turbine Blades Are So Hard t...

Wyoming News Report on Wind Turbines arriving at Landfill
https://www.wyomingnewsnow.tv/2020/09...

Everything Is Radioactive
https://www.discovermagazine.com/heal...

Walking with Ligers
Lions, Tigers and Ligers! | World's W...

Edward Teller’s Big Day at the American Petroleum Institute
https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2022/09/16...

Info on Plutonium
https://world-nuclear.org/information...

Shadow of a Giant by Clark Ferguson
https://arcticartssummit.ca/articles/...

TV Tropes - Can’t spell Failsafe without FAIL
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

COVRA: Netherlands Waste Management Organization
Instagram: COZtMKurnOu
https://www.covra.nl/en/

What if you fell in a spent fuel pool?
What If You Fell Into a Spent Nuclear...

MY WATER VELOCITY MATH (from 20m10s)

He says they get 10 to the minus 14 or minus 15 metres per second. We’ll start with minus 14 (13 zeroes).

0.00000000000001 m/s
X 60 s/min = 0.0000000000006 m/min
X 60 min/hour = 0.000000000036 m/hour
X 24 hours/day = 0.000000000864 m/day
X 365 days/year = 0.00000031536 m/year

1m divided by 0.00000031536 m/year = 3 170 979.1 years/m

Then to get the result for 10 to the negative 15 m/s, I slide the decimal one place to the right.

31 709 791 years/m

So somewhere around 3 to 30 million years for water to move a metre. In other words, a thousand times slower than completely still.

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