How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Waste
Decouple Studio’s Jesse Freestone did the maths: in less than 400 years you too can cuddle up with a bundle of spent CANDU fuel and watch a movie.
Nuclear and Chill?
Modern life is full of questions. Is ChatGPT going to take all our jobs? Is Global Warming going to kill us all? If they ever start making decent movies again as opposed to yet another superhero reboot, how long would it be before we can safely cuddle up to a bundle of spent fuel from a CANDU reactor and watch that movie together?
Thanks to Decouple Studio’s Jesse Freestone, the hero we didn’t know we needed, we have an answer to that last one: around 400 years.
How is that possible? Haven’t we all been told that nuclear waste must be kept safe for hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer?
The Jesus-shaped hole in your hand
Look at this tiny uranium fuel pellet. It’s not just any fuel pellet, it goes into our favorite reactor, the CANDU. Two will fuel the average North American for a year. Before they go into the reactor, they’re safe to hold in your bare hands.
Of course, the technicians do handle them with gloves. But that’s to protect the fuel from “humanity’s filthy fingers,” and not the other way around. After they’ve spent their time producing all that power however, it’s a different matter. As Jesse puts it, the spent fuel pellet would instantly put “a Jesus-shaped hole in your hand” en route to irradiating you with a lethal dose of gamma ray in seconds.
This is why the hot stuff, called “high-level waste,” is put into a pool to chill out for 10-20 years. After that, they’re put into what’s called a dry-storage cask. Sheathed in steel and concrete, they give off less radiation than you’d get in an airplane flight.
The power of exponential decay
What people don’t get about waste is while they stay radioactive for a long time, that radioactivity is constantly decaying at an EXPONENTIAL rate. So while it’s true the waste stays radioactive for 100,000 years, the waste immediately starts to get less radioactive the moment it leaves the reactor. It’s actually only the first thousand that is concerning. In fact, 99.9% of that initial radioactivity that would make it so fatal would have decayed away within 40 years.
“The question we should ask ourselves is not ‘is something radioactive,’” said Jesse, “but how radioactive is it and what kind of radiation is it emitting.”
Not all waste
Ironically, only nuclear waste, the one people tend to be the most hung up about, conveniently reduces in harm so rapidly. Other toxic wastes generated by human industrial activity tend to remain toxic. Welcome to Yellowknife, Canada.
Gold mining here in the 1940s have caused 237,000 tonnes of arsenic to accumulate here, enough to kill every human on the planet several times over. A child died in 1951 after eating snow from the area. For the time being this enormous store of poison is kept under control by continuously pumping coolant into the ground to the tune of $1 billion a year.
Unlike the nuclear waste, the arsenic at Yellowknife will stay just as toxic, year after year.
When the most dangerous things are the safest
Around 10,000 people die every year falling off ladders. That is more people dying in one year than we’ve ever lost in passenger flights, which has gotten so safe that last year the world only lost 400 people out of an estimated 4 billion passenger flights. It’s not that flying through the air is not dangerous, but we’ve learned to manage that risk.
The same is true for nuclear waste. While it is undoubtedly dangerous, we’ve managed the threat of nuclear waste so well that “after 70 years of operating around 500 nuclear power reactors in over 30 countries, we don’t have a single recorded case of a human dying from exposure to civilian nuclear waste.”
I hope this post has piqued your interest, but to get the full story, watch Jesse’s Ultimate Waste Video. You’ll laugh, you’ll learn, and you’ll get so many good comebacks to the perennial question: “but what about the waste?”
A great video. I learned a lot. Being pro-nuclear energy for a long time, I was not aware of the exponential decay rate, neither the gamma-less radiation after approx 400 years. Good point, about the grossly oversafeting of nuclear fuel. I brings to mind what Schellenberg said regarding the Fukushima radiation reduction scheme, removing the top soil over a huge area around Fukushima, although the background radiation levels were comparable to a what an airline steward(ess ) receives in the course of her/his job. One critical comment, though: Co2 should not be demonized. Geological analysis going hundreds of million years back, show levels up to 20-fold higher than what we have now, without reaching any tipping point or positive feedback spiral. Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for his "inconvenient truth" presentation of the ice core data going 650.000 years back. What he failed to show was the opposite relationship between temperature and CO2 levels. (Temperature rises before the CO2 levels rise, which make sense as water will outgas CO2 when temperature increases) . Still, nuclear power represents the future, and the sooner humanity realizes it, the better.
Terrific article ... but ... sorry to nitpick little details :) 10,000 deaths from ladders? There are about 100/yr in the US ... https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/newsroom/feature/ladder-safety.html#:~:text=Each%20year%20in%20the%20U.S.,March%20is%20ladder%20safety%20month.
Even if deaths were pro-rata elsewhere, that would be ~2,500. I'm guessing Africa doesn't have as many ladders as the US ... ditto India. China?
Sorry to nit-pick, but without a source, a number should be believable and 10,000 just sounds wrong.