"Nuclear power! " "Nuclear power. .
. " "NUCLEAR POWER" "Nuclear waste. .
. " "Nuclear waste? " "Nuclear waste" Ok.
I need to show you something: This is a nuclear reactor built in 1962. . .
"The atomic power plant of the future. . .
" "being developed by Argonne National Laboratory. . .
" But it's not just any old nuclear reactor. "This reactor is different in many ways from the nuclear power plants that supply some of our homes today with electricity. .
. " The biggest difference was the fuel they used to make electricity. This nuclear reactor made electricity out of nuclear waste.
"Nuclear waste! " "Nuclear waste. .
. " "Some kind of nuclear waste. .
. " "Well sir, where should we dump this batch? " When I think of nuclear waste, I think of that classic glowing green goo in yellow barrels.
. . this radioactive stuff that we end up with after all of the fuel is used up.
. . that we have to store for hundreds of thousands of years because it's so dangerous.
We fight about nuclear waste all the time! We say, can we even use nuclear because we end up with this radioactive waste? And where should we store it?
And not near my house! And you're telling me that there's a nuclear reactor that can make electricity out of nuclear waste and it was built in the 1960s? Back then, they were predicting that we would use this technology to build this incredible clean energy future: "By the year 2000 more than half the electric power of the country will come from atomic sources.
" But today, we're nowhere close to that. We don't reuse any of our nuclear waste. Instead it just piles up.
But if this technology works, that means that our nuclear waste isn't radioactive trash. It's an incredible clean energy resource and it's just sitting there sucking up money to keep it safe! We think about technology as constantly moving forward but this is a story about how we left behind a technology that could change our energy future.
So this video is about what happened. . .
to using nuclear waste to make electricity, to the clean energy future that we could have had. But more importantly, this video is about the people trying to bring that future back. "Nuclear waste" "Nuclear waste problem.
. . " "A concern about nuclear energy.
. . " "There are concerns about emissions.
. . " "Abundant power!
" "We need clean energy! " "Energizes the city. .
. " "We are coming up with new nuclear reactors -" "that will guarantee a plentiful supply of atomic power for the nation "and the world for centuries to come. " I first got obsessed with this topic because a couple of weeks ago my friend and fellow video journalist Johnny Harris called me up and he asked me for some help on a video that he was making all about nuclear power.
. . "Let's do this.
I'm going to go down the rabbit hole on why people are afraid of nuclear energy. What are the events and the things that freak us all out? " "And I kind of want you to do the opposite.
To look at, is there a future for this technology and should we actually be as afraid as we are? " So I started to dig into it! And as part of my research process into nuclear power, I got invited to go visit one of the largest and oldest national research centers in the United States.
Here we are! This is Argonne National Laboratory. We're going to get to go see the research that they're doing and they have been doing research on nuclear power since before I was born.
Hold on. Do you recognize that name? "Argonne National Laboratory" Yeah.
This was the same national lab that developed that incredible old nuclear waste recycling reactor. But I didn't know that yet. .
. So we go on this incredible tour, it's awesome, I'm learning a ton. I'm thinking, oh my god I'm going to be so over-prepared to talk to Johnny about nuclear power.
And on this tour with me are these two people from Oklo, which is a company that's working on new kinds of nuclear reactors. And at the end of the tour, I'm sitting with them under this big tree and one of them says something that just short circuits my brain: "So we're actually working with Argonne closely on how to recycle existing nuclear waste in the US. There's enough used fuel to power the country for the next 150 years.
Wait. . .
I'm sorry. . .
what? There is enough used fuel in the country, in the US alone, to generate power for the country for the next 150 years. "There's enough used fuel - meaning nuclear waste - in the US to power the country for 150 years.
" You can see me not believing her! I think it's some fake math. Like maybe technically there's enough energy there but like we could never really use it, we don't know how to do that.
. . Is it like when they say, you know "Geothermal, you can power the Earth for like thousands of years if we could get all of the energy out of the earth!
" It's like yeah, we can't, we don't know how to do that. Do we know how to. .
. ? ?
"Yeah! We just don't have the facility, a commercial facility to do so. But the technology is there.
" Experts differ on the exact number of years here but they agree that the nuclear waste we have now could be used as a large energy source based on technology that we've already built. But it gets even better: If you reuse that nuclear waste, especially if you reuse it more than once, you can dramatically cut down on the amount of time that the waste after all of that's done is radioactive for. So the amount of time that we have to store our nuclear waste.
The problems are cost and global politics, not fundamental technology. Here we go! *Knocking* By the time I got to DC to talk to Johnny about this, I was obsessed.
Hello! Good morning! Welcome to our studio!
We have all this nuclear waste, right? And it is scary. But imagine that there was a way that you could actually not just store it but actually use it.
"So you can use nuclear waste as fuel for more energy. . .
" You can recycle nuclear waste, yes. And I dived all the way into this in a video that I'm now going to promise is going to be on my channel by the time we air this one. This is that video.
To understand what's going on here, you have to understand that nuclear waste isn't what you've been told. Okay hang on a sec. So a lot of the footage that I got in this video is from Storyblocks and they're sponsoring this video.
I genuinely love Storyblocks. I use them in every video. If you watch Huge If True, you've seen Storyblocks.
Here are just a few examples: So in my recent video with Marques Brownlee, all of these beautiful shots, all from Storyblocks. Or this shot in my recent episode from curing cancer, also Storyblocks. Or this whole montage in my video on the James Webb Space Telescope, also from Storyblocks.
So here's how this works: I just go to their website, Storyblocks dot com, I type in what I want to show and tada! And the best part is with my subscription I can go through this and I can download as many clips as I want from their library and it's all royalty free. They even have a creative cloud plugin so I can access all of this footage and templates and audio and all of that from my editing software.
I use Adobe Premiere. So go check them out! I think you'll like them.
I'll put a link in my description or you can just scan the QR code right here. Now back to the story. .
. All right, let's zoom out for a sec. Basically all the electricity that you use, except solar comes from spinning a turbine.
*whispers* "It's magic. . .
" Most of the time, inside a power plant, what you're really doing is you're heating up a liquid into steam and using that to spin the turbine. The most common way to do that is still burning stuff near it. That's fossil fuels.
But you could also use liquid that the Earth already heated up for you! That's geothermal. Or you can split atoms apart inside special rocks and make them really hot.
That's nuclear. And the special hot rocks are uranium. "Uranium" "Uranium 235" "Uranium" "Uraaaaaaanium fever" But only a really small part of natural uranium, less than one percent, is a kind of breakable uranium that can sustain a nuclear reaction.
This is "Uranium-235. " The number refers to the number of neutrons in the atom. So typically uranium goes through a process called "enrichment," which is making more of the Uranium-235 out of the less useful Uranium-238.
By the time that's all done, your fuel looks like this. If you take your finger up to your first joint, that's about the size of a uranium fuel pellet. Those pellets then go into these long metal rods that I got to see while I was at Argonne and then comes the nuclear reaction.
So you fire a bunch of free atoms at your Uranium-235, which cracks it into smaller very unstable atoms and throws off a couple other neutrons in the process which zoom off and hit more uranium nearby and then more and more, a chain reaction of splitting atoms. And each time they get split a little mass turns into energy which makes the rods really hot, which heats the water, which spins the turbine, which generates electricity. .
. tada! But, eventually after four to six, years you've broken enough of that special uranium that the reaction stops working efficiently and that spent fuel is now considered high level nuclear waste.
At this point, that waste is a mix of 238 and a little bit of leftover 235 and a bunch of very unstable atoms that give off ionizing radiation. That ionizing radiation in large doses is the bad stuff. It's the scary invisible killer that affects our tissues and our DNA in often deadly ways.
And the thing is this nuclear waste stays radioactive for an insanely long time. We're talking hundreds of thousands of years sometimes which is - to put it mildly - a problem. "We've got to find better and safer ways to store nuclear waste.
" "Waste that can remain radioactive for centuries, that remains a big problem. . .
" Right now, most nuclear waste in the United States is stored in dry casks that look like this to protect people from the radioactive material inside. Those dry casts are meant to last decades, but not hundreds of thousands of years which is what we're talking about here. So we've been having this ongoing fight for decades about what to do with nuclear waste.
There are options for long-term storage and some countries are already doing that - Johnny and I got into the details in his video. But right now in the US and in lots of other countries there are a lot of dry casks full of nuclear waste just sitting there at nuclear power plants. So to summarize: We take uranium out of the ground, we use it once, and then we store it basically forever.
This is the "once through" fuel cycle that the US has today. Now listen to the analogy that they used in the 1960s to describe how stupid this fuel cycle would be: "Would you say that using the 235 and not the rest is sort of like using the cream and throwing away the milk? " "Exactly.
" The key is to figure out how to filter out the stuff that's still useful from the real waste that's not. Turns out, Argonne is one of the few places that is still testing nuclear waste recycling in the US, and I got to go see it. I'm just gonna go right on up and they're gonna tell me to stop filming right.
. . now.
It was as a whole thing. I had to send them my passport to prove that I was a US citizen before they'd let me on the tour and I wasn't allowed to film inside. In order to go into this place that I can't show you, I have to wear these cool safety glasses.
. . How do I look?
Let's do it. Luckily, Argonne itself has actually published footage from the lab that I toured, so here's what they're doing inside that large protective box: First they cut up the nuclear waste into little pieces then they dissolved those pieces into a vat of molten salts when they run electricity through that vat it separates the uranium and other useful materials from the rest of the junk and pushes it across the vat where it creates deposits of the useful stuff on the other side. Then they make new fuel rods out of those deposits and stick them back in a reactor.
And it's not just possible to do that once, you can do it multiple times, not just making electricity but also reducing how long that waste is radioactive for because you're using up the materials that last the longest, from hundreds of thousands of years down sometimes to hundreds of years, which is a much easier time frame to store something. If you can pull this off you can have a nuclear fuel cycle that looks like this: You mine the uranium, you use it in a reactor, filter out the useful stuff, then you use it again and maybe again and again. And when you can't anymore, then you put it in much shorter term storage that's much more manageable.
This is called a "closed" fuel cycle and there are lots of variations. But it's not hypothetical. Some countries like Japan for example are already doing this, and they say they do it because it reduces their dependence on imported fuel it conserves uranium and it reduces the radioactivity of their nuclear waste, which makes sense.
So what happened in the United States? "Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you. .
. " In 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced new policies meant to stop the growing risk of nuclear war. And that meant stopping all nuclear recycling.
Why? Well, you remember the materials that we separated out during the recycling process. One of those materials was plutonium which is a highly radioactive element that was seen as the highest concern for nuclear proliferation.
So President Jimmy Carter stopped all nuclear recycling, saying "a viable and economic nuclear power program can be sustained without such reprocessing and recycling. " The US moved away from the kinds of reactors that could handle nuclear waste called "fast reactors" and toward the kinds of reactors that exist today called "light water reactors. " But while the US stopped nuclear recycling, other countries didn't.
The ban on nuclear recycling stopped being seen as helpful to slow the threat of nuclear proliferation, so President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981. But by then companies, had invested in the kinds of reactors that couldn't recycle, the kind that we have now. Today, the main claim is that nuclear fuel recycling is too high cost it's just not economical.
And that's true, compared to using new uranium which has been cheap and plentiful. What incentive did anyone have to recycle their fuel? But those incentives are changing.
The combination of wondering whether global conflict will cut off fuel supply and the recognition that we need more clean energy in as many ways as possible as fast as possible has started to wake people up to a technology and a dream that we left behind. "We are not far off from it. We're not talking about a technology that we're dreaming of, that we hope can work.
We're talking about technology that has already been demonstrated before and proven. We just need to commercialize it. " There is a lot to figure out and a long way to go but if we can recycle nuclear waste, I think it says something profound about what we as humans are capable of: Splitting atoms, sure!
But I mean something much more simple: Changing our minds, and overcoming our fears, to use our resources and our technology and our ingenuity to make other people's lives a little bit better tomorrow than they are today. "And this of course is just the beginning. Not only will atomic power be released, someday we will harness the rise and fall of the tides and imprison the rays of the sun.
We have indeed just begun. " Huge If True is an optimistic show about using technology to make the world better. If that's something that you believe in the best thing that you can do to support us is to subscribe.
And if you do subscribe, let me know I'd love to meet you in the comments. See you for the next one!
