DeWitt: All US commercial nuclear waste fits on one football field
Jake DeWitt · Will advanced reactors solve nuclear's problems? · Feb 25, 2022 · at 1:02:26
Oklo CEO Jake DeWitt discusses the physical volume of nuclear waste produced by the United States civilian nuclear fleet.
0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Nuclear power has produced, you know, a lot of energy for decades right? Producing 20% of our energy for, well, I don't, 30 plus, 40 plus years, and then before that as well. And the amount of waste it's produced would fit on a football field, being like, you know, 30 or 40 feet high.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jake DeWitt
DeWitt: Nuclear requires the least materials per lifetime gigawatt-hour
“And when you look at that, nuclear by far requires the least of all energy sources available to us today. And it's a significant difference in advantage.”
DeWitt: Fast reactors can reduce nuclear waste storage timelines to centuries
“Fast reactors in particular have some neat attributes where they can not just use this fuel efficiently, but they can use waste from other reactors and themselves quite efficiently and economically so, right? That's been one of the big hangups and holdups for …”
DeWitt: Oklo submitted a 600-page NRC application instead of 10,000+ pages
“Instead of being a 10,000 plus page document, it was, you know, 600 pages. It was, which by the way, mind you, is actually still a higher page per megawatt count than other plants, so it doesn't scale perfectly like that, but still significantly more efficient…”
DeWitt: Large Western nuclear builds face multi-billion-dollar cost overruns
“The challenges with new builds, especially in Western countries with these big, Light water cooled, in other words, just water cooled power plants that produce like a thousand megawatts, you know, they're years behind schedule, billions of dollars over budget …”
DeWitt: Nuclear systems produce heat much more cheaply than electricity
“Nuclear systems fundamentally produce heat that we then do things with. And so they actually produce heat much more cheaply than they even produce electricity.”
DeWitt: Very few Western nuclear applications succeeded in the past 40 years
“There have been very few successes in the last 40 years where plants that have submitted their initial applications to not just the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but any Western regulator and had those plans actually built and operated.”