The Exchanges

Q Okay, so significant differences, as you said. Maybe can you help me break it down as I think about, um, the, all the different reactor types that are currently being pursued to, to come? Like, which ones present the easiest waste handling challenge? Which ones present the hardest?

A Right. So anything that is a high-temperature gas reactor that nominally uses Triso, and there's a lot of these that are in the mix there, right, that would not be a challenge. Any of your molten salt reactor designs that use a Triso fuel, that would not be a challenge. If you have a molten salt reactor with fuel dissolved in core, that would be potentially something that you need to address and condition and things of that nature. Any of the sodium fast reactor designs, so your TerraPower, your Oklo, things of this nature, this would be A conversation where you need to have, at a minimum, a waste conditioning component to this, and if you're a company like Oklo, that's very much thinking openly about recycling, right, you're, you're basically moving down that path anyways, so, um, and for any of the light water reactor designs that are being considered, like, uh, the GE Hitachi reactor, um, Westinghouse, right, that's not an advanced reactor design, and when the AP 1000, right, we have very established pathways with respect to managing those types of

AI assessment note: “anything that is a high-temperature gas reactor that nominally uses Triso... would not be a challenge”

Q Let's talk about nuclear waste. First of all, what is it, actually? Like, what, what is the waste that we care about?

A Right, so, so nuclear waste is basically any commercial waste that the U.S. has is uranium dioxide, basically, uh, ceramic is the way that I describe it, what's made out of your, your coffee, coffee mug there, and it has many things from the periodic table, and it's a largely second-row transition metals, early second-row transition metals, As well as lanthanides, as well as basically some actinides heavier than uranium. And what this means is that the uranium composition, as far as the actual irradiated meat, ends up being about 95% of the material, and then the other five percent are these fission products that grow in over the course of the irradiation, as well as the, what I call the, the transmutation products, basically, when the uranium gets struck by By a neutron. Captures that neutron instead of fissioning, and that grows into your plutonium, your neptunium, your americium, all these sorts of pieces, right? So that's largely what it's comprised of. It stays in the fuel. It's a solid. Some people are surprised to learn that it's not a liquid goo. I've just been watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with the kids recently, so that's not what it is.

AI assessment note: “nuclear waste is basically any commercial waste that the U.S. has is uranium dioxide”

Q so, so 95% of it is, as I understand it, 95% of it is the stuff we don't worry so much about, but we worry a lot about that five percent, right? And that, that five percent is comprised of, at least in part, a bunch of these isotopes that have various degrees of radioactivity and various half-lives. Can you just kind of, like, break it down a little bit?

A Yeah, so we can get into that a little bit more. So your, your actinides and your minor actinides, so your plutonium, your neptunium, your americium, so all those sorts of things are, grow in, and they basically constitute the long-term waste management burden for the nuclear material, and this is something that's very different than what you have, say, in, in fusion nuclear waste, right, because fusion nuclear waste is just activation products. It's the, Uh, basically your, your transition metals and other things that were rated over, radiated over the course of that. And so, that maybe comprises about one percent of it by, by volume with respect to that. And then you have this four percent of other material that are, are your fission products. And so, those are things that if you're able to take them out, for the most part, could generate a waste management timeline of, on the order of more like several hundred years, not talking about something on the order of millions of years. There are Interceptions to that. For example, technetium 99 has a very long, uh, waste management burden. Things like iodine, uh, one, I believe it, I forget if it's one 29, one 31, that also can have a very long waste management burden. So there are a couple of standouts from that perspective, but it's largely your actinides that drive that waste management challenge over the long haul.

AI assessment note: “your actinides and your minor actinides, so your plutonium, your neptunium, your americium”

Q being tens of thousands of years and some things lasting even longer than that. Is it just that, like, is it just a quantity difference? Like, there's a lot of, a portion of that five percent that is, uh, Uh, it is a 200 year life or whatever, and then a very tiny fraction that is a million year life, or I don't know, how do I think about that?

A That's the right way to think about it. There is a very small fraction that comprises a lifetime that's potentially on the order of millions of years that you have to manage and obligate, and really it boils down to the social construct of, we decided when it comes to regulating nuclear waste that when we generate it, We are going to manage it for the long haul, and so, basically, because we don't do anything with respect to separation management, et cetera, that material all stays within there, and as a consequence of that, you take that material, and ideally, you take it to a geological repository for disposal at some point, and this was something that, not to jump into this too much, that we debated quite a bit in the seventies, About how we were going to handle and manage this waste? Were we going to do, ah, you know, basically a mined repository, which is what we settled on? Were we going to launch it up into space? Were we going to put it in the Marianas Trench? Like, all of these things were considered, um, and ultimately, for a variety of reasons, we decided that deep geological disposal was what made sense, ah, with respect to that, so.

AI assessment note: “That's the right way to think about it. There is a very small fraction”

Q I guess the other thing I want to understand is, like, paint me a picture. What, what does storage and handling look like for this Unreal? I mean, you said it's in these solid casks. Like, what is the building? What is the facility? What needs to be done in that facility? Is it just inactive of building, or is there stuff happening? What does it look like?

A I mean, you can go to these sites and see basically there's a couple of different ways that the material is stored. One of them is you have a spent fuel pool, and this is where you take the material when it first comes out of the reactor, right? And this is, you can imagine the, the radioactive, radioactivity of the material dropping off like an exponential as far as just kind of over time. And what's actually funny about what I was talking about, the fission products and the things earlier, Is that early on, those are some of the most toxic and hazardous because they have such a high specific activity, right? But they just decay quickly away, right? So you're waiting, all of those fission products decay away. You put that in a, in a spent fuel, both to manage the radioactive hazard of this. Water is actually a pretty good shield, as well as just thermally. You're keeping the material cool and all those sorts of pieces. So you let that happen, and that happens maybe for, for a decade or so. And then you're in the position where you can take the material out, And put it in these, these dry storage casts, right? And so these casts, you know, they're, they're pretty tall. You know, I'm trying to think, I'm trying to conceptualize, um, and, you know, think about what a good comparator of them would be with respect to width and things of that nature. But you can fit a decent amount …

AI assessment note: “One of them is you have a spent fuel pool... put it in these, these dry storage casts”

Q Final, final question for you. Do, are you optimistic about, uh, Yucca Mountain II. Oh, are we, do you think that we will end up with a centralized repository in this country, or is it just in perpetuity we're just going to store next to wherever the reactor is, or in some centralized site that, you know, a microreactor company needs to ship back to?

A Right. This is something that I think, well, there's a couple of different things that this actually connects to. One of them is that I would be surprised if Nevada ends up stepping forward into this space again as far as, you know, there's conversations with respect to that being of consideration, etc. I also think that it can be very hard for a given state to accept the entirety of nuclear material for the nation, right, without necessarily all the right incentive structures with respect to that. There have been a couple of very nice studies on this. One of them, Hank Jenkins-Smith, Out of the University of Oklahoma has basically done some surveying work asking people, okay, you know, what if we, what if we were to just ask you as a state to take on the nuclear, nuclear waste, nuclear material for the nation? What are your sentiments about that? And it's kind of like, not necessarily all that great. What if we asked you to do this with respect to not only a nuclear repository, but also a recycling facility? And then it's like, oh, okay, we're potentially more interested in that. And then if you have a conversation about, okay, what about, you know, nuclear repository, nuclear fuel recycling facility, as well as a national lab, or something like that. And then people, you know, there's even stronger social sentiment and interest for that. And so, I do think that there is a com…

AI assessment note: “I would be surprised if Nevada ends up stepping forward into this space again”

Q Okay. And then let's go back to what we had planned to do with it and what we're actually doing with it. So, give me the brief history of the planning. You've talked about deep geologic storage in Yucca Mountain, but we haven't actually addressed it directly. What were we supposed to do with it, and what are we actually doing with that 90,000 metric tons?

A Right. So, with respect to that, the plan was to, to put it in Yucca Mountain. This was something that we decided, um, Uh, decades ago, basically, and, you know, at the time, it made a lot of sense. Frankly, you know, there were many things that we were doing within the state of Nevada that connected to nuclear waste. Nominally, um, you know, we were also testing a lot of nuclear weapons within the state of Nevada, so the idea, I can imagine how people looked at this and said, oh, maybe disposal of more nuclear waste is not really that far of a stretch when we're already doing Uh, these types of activities in Nevada. And over time, there were a lot of different factors that intersected with this. Um, you know, Las Vegas became its own blooming economy. Um, there wasn't this sort of dependent intersection with the Nevada economy with, basically, with respect to waste disposal, and so I think people looked at this and started to say, do we actually need to take the nuclear waste? What's in it for us? And this has been basically a long-standing dynamic where we've seen repeated time and time again With respect to, potentially, you can have local support for disposal. Then you might have a state disconnect with respect to, does the state really want to necessarily take this waste? We've even seen this with respect to, um, lawsuits that we've seen in Texas and New Mexico, where mayb…

AI assessment note: “the plan was to, to put it in Yucca Mountain.”

Q different degrees of Danger as well. There's some stuff that's actually like, you know, in theory, if that's all we had, we could handle it like we handle many other toxic or corrosive things. We ship ammonia all over the world. Like, is it, is it that level of, of a type of thing? And then there's some others that are super duper radioactive, or is it all pretty consistent?

A Right. So there's lots of different things to touch on with, you know, some of the things that you were observing there, right? So with respect to recycling the material and that Potentially being a pathway to minimize waste versus not. This is something that is really discussed quite a bit, and one of the things that you have to keep in mind is, so say you're, you irradiate some fuel, and you take that fuel, and you pull it back out, right, and then if you don't recycle, or you operate what is basically an open fuel cycle, which is what the U.S. does, right, then you are then taking more fresh material and irradiating it and pulling it out, and so what you have is a scenario where now you basically have double the amount Of material that you potentially needed, as opposed to if you had just taken that material that you originally radiated, chopped it up, dissolved it, recycling it. Now you've got, instead of, you know, in the open fuel cycle scenario where you've doubled the amount of waste that you have just in that example, now you could take that material and basically say, ok, I'm gonna take that 95% of the material that I could still irradiate and put into fuel, and just put that back into the reactor, right? So you're basically reusing the same material, and so The argument I would present there is you are actually minimizing the amount of radioactive waste that you're g…

AI assessment note: “with respect to recycling the material and that Potentially being a pathway to minimize waste”