074 F2F Interns, Nuclear Waste Discussion

Mark Hinaman (00:00)
Because when people say nuclear fuel or spent nuclear fuel or nuclear waste, like when you just look at it, it looks the same before and after it gets irradiated, right? Like these are, and it's really boring. Like when people think fuel for energy, like I think like gasoline and barrels of oil and like compressed.

tanks with compressed natural gas in it or pipelines. like nuclear fuels really just uninteresting.

Yeah, like, can you describe, Camille, like, physically what these things look like? What they feel like?

Camille Thompson (00:26)
To my understanding

they're just hard pellets, like the actual fuel pellets are just really small pellets that they're dropping into the tube and they're completely solid. It's not like green goo like the Simpsons or anything or any of the cartoons are displaying it. It's yeah pretty boring like you said.

Mark Hinaman (01:47)
Okay, welcome to another episode of the Fire to Fission podcast where we talk about energy dense fuels and how they can better human lives. My name is Mark Heineman and I'm joined today by other Fire to Fission members. We've got four of us on the call today as well as our producer, Cameron, in the background. So really excited to jump into this conversation. This is a little bit of a different format than what we've done in the past where we kind of interview guests one on one.

one on two, so excited to jump in. Let's see, joining us on the call, we've got Andrew O'Brien, Chloe Koch, and Camille Thompson. They're all University of Colorado students or new grads, and they've been helping Fire Division out this summer with a of research and extra work, so yeah, excited to jump in. How you guys doing, Andrew, Chloe, and Camille?

Andrew O'Brien (02:37)
Doing well, happy to be on the podcast. You know, I've been following it for some time and so it's exciting to be behind the mic today.

Camille Thompson (02:43)
Yeah, it's definitely an honor to be on the podcast finally.

Chloe (02:47)
Yeah, I'm excited to get started.

Mark Hinaman (02:50)
So today we are talking about waste, specifically two forms of waste, nuclear waste and produced water. Produced water from the oil and gas industry. So this was a question that I'd poised to our team earlier in the summer in a curiosity of mine that was like, okay, well, everyone always asks, what about the waste? What about the waste? What about the waste with regard to nuclear?

But other forms of energy generation also have waste. as we've talked a bunch about this summer, there's trade-offs with different energy forms and different energy sources. So I wanted to compare, like, I know that there's produced water and oil and gas, and there's a bunch of waste, but I hadn't actually run the numbers. So Andrew, Camille, and Chloe all dug in and learned a bunch about it. So I'm going let you guys tell the story, but I'll just ask questions and try and guide conversations.

So let's start with Andrew. Andrew, do you want to give some framing for kind of what the problem was and what we looked at?

Andrew O'Brien (03:48)
Yeah, exactly. So at a high level, like you'd said, wanted to compare waste and oil and gas with waste and nuclear. Such a hot topic. Wanted to kind of see how the two stack up. And so to kind of frame the problem, we dug into produced water in particular. It's one of the largest waste streams in oil and gas. And we dug into what exactly is inside this produced water, broke it down by concentration and total volume, and then compared that with what is produced annually in the nuclear industry.

Mark Hinaman (04:16)
Awesome. Yeah, that's super helpful. So let's start with some definitions. Like let's talk about what these waste forms are. I'll start with spent nuclear fuel. Who wants to describe spent nuclear fuel?

Camille Thompson (04:31)
I can take that one. Spent nuclear fuel is composed mostly of uranium, so around 96 % is still uranium. Of that 96%, over 95 % is U-238, which is naturally occurring uranium. The rest of that uranium is U-235, which is still, like it's the active fuel, the fissionable fuel that was originally enriched. Remaining, we have some fission products, so.

some plutonium and other actinides or transuranic waste, is any isotopes that are heavier than uranium, the U-235. Those are what are contributing to our radioactive levels. Roughly, I mean high level, the spent rods, the spent fuel rods are like all solid, so they're gonna be cladded rods with then solid fuel pellets in them.

⁓ we can get into how they're stored after, but most of that is either ⁓ still fuel that can be recycled, so the U-238 can still be enriched and recycled and used in other reactors, and then the rest of that is a pretty minor level, like it's less than 5 % that's radioactive. So when we were looking into these calculations, we were keeping in mind that only

roughly 5 % of this is actually waste and the rest is recyclable fuel.

Mark Hinaman (05:56)
Yeah, I mean, I like that you said that it's solid. That was going be one of my questions. Like, what does this stuff actually look like? Because when people say nuclear fuel or spent nuclear fuel or nuclear waste, like when you just look at it, it looks the same before and after it gets irradiated, right? Like these are, and it's really boring. Like when people think fuel for energy, like I think like gasoline and barrels of oil and like compressed.

tanks with compressed natural gas in it or pipelines. like nuclear fuels really just uninteresting.

Yeah, like, can you describe, Camille, like, physically what these things look like? What they feel like?

Camille Thompson (06:31)
To my understanding

they're just hard pellets, like the actual fuel pellets are just really small pellets that they're dropping into the tube and they're completely solid. It's not like green goo like the Simpsons or anything or any of the cartoons are displaying it. It's yeah pretty boring like you said.

Mark Hinaman (06:50)
Yeah, and the fuel rods, like you said, cladding, right? So it's metallic silver casings, cases, tubes, you call them. They look like rectangular tubes that are super long relative to how thick they are. Okay, what about produced water? What does produced water look like?

Andrew O'Brien (07:08)
Yeah, so produced water can kind of come in a lot of different varieties, but it's essentially just very salty, high dissolved solids. It comes out of the ground when you're extracting oil and gas. Usually it could be a bit brown, could be a bit discolored depending on where you are. This is filtered out through the process. You've got settling tanks that separate the oil and the gas.

But yeah, it's essentially just kind of murky water with a ton of salt and dissolved solids in it.

Mark Hinaman (07:39)
Got you. produce water. Yeah, murky brown fluid that...

I guess it's not entirely fair for us to compare these two things exactly. spent nuclear fuel has already generated energy and produced water is like a raw feedstock for what, I guess raw feedstock that's produced when we produce oil, right, comes out, oil or gas that comes out of the ground. So I mean there are produced feedstocks from

nuclear also, ⁓ tailings on the, for uranium milling or tailings on, what, during the enrichment process, right? But those are generally like not hazardous, not super hazardous, and there are companies that are actively managing them. And it's not what people think of when they think of spent nuclear fuel, right? So not necessarily a one-to-one comparison.

Andrew O'Brien (08:29)
But I think it's a good comparison, know, just getting orders of magnitude and understanding like there are waste streams in both of these industries. know, one is orders of magnitude larger than the other.

Mark Hinaman (08:40)
Yeah. Okay. So produce water. What is it composed of? Do you guys have specific elements to call out? Like what's in this produce? I mean, number one, it's water, right? Mostly water. But what else?

Chloe (08:55)
Yeah, think so produced water is gonna be mostly, I think Andrew was saying this salty water. That's a very big percentage of it. I don't know the exact percent, but we were looking at kind of the more harmful heavy metals that are normally found in produced water. And so side note, produced water is always gonna be different kind of just like spent nuclear fuel. You're never gonna know

the exact fission products that you get out, you're never gonna know the exact salts or heavy metals that you're gonna get from produced water. So there's always gonna be some sort of variability. But there was a study done that we looked at in New Mexico, and they kind of averaged out all the different compounds. And we determined the ones that are most harmful to human health, and we found that it was arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, and benzene.

were the main ones. but most of it is just gonna be salty water at the end of the day. It's also called brine water for a reason, because it's got so much salt in it, so.

Camille Thompson (10:01)
you

Andrew O'Brien (10:04)
important to kind of note that there's naturally occurring radionuclides in this as well. So not to the scale that nuclear spent fuel is, but there is some level of radioactivity to this produced water as well.

Mark Hinaman (10:16)
Yeah, that's norm, right? Naturally occurring radioactive material. Folks have heard that acronym before, norm. how salty is it? Do we have numbers or metrics for total dissolved solids? And can we quantify produced water?

Andrew O'Brien (10:34)
Yeah, so the total dissolved solids from our study was about 120,000 milligrams per liter. For reference, seawater is typically about 35,000. So yeah, about three times the number of dissolved solids in produced water as what is typically found in seawater.

Mark Hinaman (10:56)
Got it. And that's, that was, I guess this study was for Permian?

Andrew O'Brien (11:00)
Yeah, so the study was conducted at

a number of sites across the Permian Basin.

Mark Hinaman (11:04)
So yeah, I'm aware of produced water streams from North Dakota that are up to 250,000 parts per million, or TDS. that's, yeah, there's a huge range. You can have a huge range of old dissolved salts. What is the process that the industry uses to dispose of water? What does the industry do with it?

Chloe (11:22)
Thank

Thank

first what they do is they have to transport it. So they have two main ways of doing that. They'll either just put it on pretty much the back of a truck and ship it over to the treating facility or they will have a pipeline. Kind of just depends on the site and the resources. And then once they get it to the site, there's a couple of methods. They will either just inject it back into the ground or they will treat it. ⁓

there's produced water processing facilities and it's pretty much just they treat it and then there's a giant pond just full of this water. They kind of just let it sit there, so.

Mark Hinaman (12:04)
Yeah, I mean, when I've been exposed to it in the past, there's a bunch of different ⁓ solutions. It can be a feedstock for additional hydraulic fracturing. Some communities treat it to be potable, so you can put it back on the ground or in rivers. ⁓ It's pretty expensive to remove that much salt out of it to get it back to be like freshwater status.

Okay, yeah, Chloe, you said move it like either on truck or in pipelines. Where are you moving it from and moving it to?

Chloe (12:35)
Yeah, you're basically just going to move it straight from the well site and to the processing facility or just wherever you're disposing it of. ⁓ Injections, I think pretty popular just because you can put it back into where it was. So don't have to think about it much.

Mark Hinaman (12:53)
Yeah, cost effective, right? Like it came out of the ground, we're putting it back into the ground. For posterity, I'll say like it's uncommon to inject back into the same formation. It's often injected back into deeper formations. But yeah, saltwater disposal sites are all over the place, very commonplace in the industry.

Andrew O'Brien (13:11)
Mark, you said it was

pretty expensive to recycle and treat this produced water. What's kind of incentivizing companies to go through this process and could kind of the same incentives be applied to the nuclear industry when it comes to recycling spent nuclear fuel?

Mark Hinaman (13:30)
Yeah, great question, Andrew. So the recycling process for produced water, I'll say it was expensive to remove enough salt or other toxins to get it to a point where it can be qualified as fresh water, like drinking, drinkable fresh water. Still possible, you can absolutely do it. just takes energy, really. It's like the primary input. ⁓

⁓ But to get it back to a level where it can be a useful input stream for additional use, like hydraulic fracturing or non-potable freshwater, isn't as expensive. So it's kind of like, you know, to get to reduce ⁓ iron content and other metals and minerals in the system that you could be...

say undesired, so you might remove some of those metals from the system and then you get it to a point that they can be very usable again. That's cheaper and can be more economic than just sourcing additional water from elsewhere if you have a high water demand for your industrial applications, such as hydraulic fracturing. I like what they do in Permian Basin.

Okay, so we mentioned toxins though. Like there's toxins in this produced water. Let's start just like on high level macro level of numbers for spent nuclear fuel versus produced water. How much volume and mass of each waste stream?

put waste in parentheses for each because we know we can recycle them and it can be more used again and useful but how much of each of these streams do we have on time basis like per year.

Camille Thompson (15:00)
Annually in the US we have roughly 2,000 tons of fuel produced and then we have around 28 billion barrels of produced water being produced annually in the US. So pretty crazy orders of magnitudes. I think each barrel is about 42 gallons so if we were comparing them it's pretty crazy.

difference between nuclear and the produced water.

Chloe (15:22)
.

Mark Hinaman (15:26)
and camellia seed.

Andrew O'Brien (15:26)
And in of solid mass,

the total dissolved solids in that volume of produced water is about 580 million tons per year. So 580 million tons of solids in produced water versus 2,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel.

Mark Hinaman (15:45)
half a billion tons of like solid. Again, nuclear fuel is solid, right? And these other toxins are, well, so let's clarify the 580 million tons. Is that just the solids that's in the spent nuclear, in the produced water? So that can be like sodium chloride, potassium chloride, like the salts that are present in it, right?

Chloe (15:53)
.

Andrew O'Brien (16:07)
Exactly, that's all inclusive, total dissolved

solids. If you were to break it out in terms of some of these, you know, the toxic compounds we kind of selected, you're looking at 14,000 tons of arsenic and 12,000 tons of benzene, just to name a couple.

Mark Hinaman (16:25)
So 14,000 tons of benzene. What was the number of hours, Nick?

Andrew O'Brien (16:29)
Sorry, 14,000 tons of arsenic and 12,000 tons of benzene.

Mark Hinaman (16:34)
Okay, yeah, I like arsenic as a metric. Like 14,000 tons of arsenic versus 2,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. So there's seven times as much like arsenic generated than all of the spent nuclear fuel, which again, like Camille, said 95 % is just still uranium that can be recycled and reused. So that's what.

100 tons then I do that my mental math right for that's like of actual waste products and spent nuclear fuel

Camille Thompson (17:06)
Yeah, exactly. Andrew actually made some good visuals, so you can go check out our article as well. But the 2,000 tons would fit onto a tennis court with the height of roughly one meter. The actual waist, so that 5%, would fit onto the tennis court with a height of roughly four centimeters. And for comparison, benzene, the total produced benzene, would fit onto a tennis court with a height of about 50 meters, which...

is pretty crazy when you're putting it into volume terms.

Mark Hinaman (17:38)
Yeah, that's bonkers. So one meter tall for all spent nuclear fuel and the actual waste is like four centimeters on a tennis court of solids, right? And that's like one tennis court for the United States. Right? Like all of the energy that's created. That's just so crazy to me. It's so little, right? Versus like we're looking at the produced water, which is one waste stream of, yeah, the oil.

Chloe (17:41)
Thank you.

Okay.

Mark Hinaman (18:06)
gas industry that

is producing what you said would be 50 meters tall of benzene if stacked on test court. So just one pollutant, or one, I'll say hazardous material, not pollutant, right? We're not putting it into the biosphere and it's not hurting people directly.

Camille Thompson (18:13)
Yeah, correct.

Mark Hinaman (18:21)
OK, 28 billion barrels a year in the US versus 2,000 tons. Did we convert? mean, barrels is volume and tons is a mass. So did we think about visuals? I mean, we talked about the tennis court example. But are there visuals of just volume between the two? Didn't we have a pool to beer can comparison?

Chloe (18:42)
Yeah, sure. So we kind of just looked at the general volume and pretty much if you kind of look at the volume comparison of the 2,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, that's roughly half of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, which would be 330,000 gallons. So if we compare

the 28 billion barrels, which again, one barrel is 42 gallons, to this 330,000 gallons. We kind of did a ratio basis and we went back and forth on this for so long. But we finally determined that if you took the produced water annually from the US and you cut it down and put that 28 billion into

like ratio-wise, an Olympic swimming pool, then the spent nuclear fuel also annually in the US would be about the size of a, what was 28 ounce Coors banquet, or no, 24 ounce tall boy Coors banquet. So if you visualize a tall boy next to an Olympic-sized swimming pool, that's kind of the volume comparison between the two.

Mark Hinaman (19:57)
That's yeah, I love that comparison number one because the course banquets are delicious Significantly better than Coors lights and since we're you know, all Colorado natives we have to say that

Andrew O'Brien (20:09)
Yeah.

Mark Hinaman (20:10)
mean like that's just hard to fathom. I guess we didn't look at the energy comparison though, right? Between the two, like normalizing because nuclear might create 20, what is it, 20 % of the electricity or 18 % of electricity in the US and then like 9 % of total energy, but then oil and gas produce a higher percentage of energy. Did we normalize to try and normalize some of these comparisons? Like waste per unit energy.

Camille Thompson (20:36)
We do. Andrea and I did those calcs. And for oil and gas, it's 18, roughly 18 kilowatt hours per gallon of waste. And for nuclear, it's roughly 45 million kilowatt hours per gallon of waste. And that's with the total spent nuclear fuel not.

Mark Hinaman (20:53)
That's so cool!

Camille Thompson (21:02)
excluding the recyclable amount. think Andrew has.

Andrew O'Brien (21:05)
Yeah, if you just do the true nuclear waste, which is that 5 % of the total spent fuel, comes out to roughly 900 million kilowatt hours of energy per gallon of nuclear waste.

Chloe (21:13)
Yeah.

Mark Hinaman (21:20)
900 million

kilowatt hours. Almost a billion kilowatt hours of energy per gallon of... And I'm sounding astonished because yeah, these are first times that I've heard these numbers too, right? Like I asked the question, that's amazing! Versus 18. 18 kilowatt hours for a gallon of oil.

Andrew O'Brien (21:34)
you

Chloe (21:36)
It's.

Mark Hinaman (21:41)
And oil is super useful, we use it all the time, it's awesome. But like, man, that's, I mean, that's, that's why we like nuclear, right? I feel like we can't, I don't know, that that statistic alone is enough for me to be like, what about the waste? The waste is awesome in nuclear. It's so cool.

Andrew O'Brien (21:55)
Yeah.

Yeah, and again, that's produced water. So it's one of the 18 kilowatt hours of energy per gallon of produced water. didn't perform it with the separate toxins, but it kind of achieves the same effect. You're still orders of magnitude bigger.

Chloe (22:12)
Yeah, and there's, think it kind of ranges, but it's around like four to six barrels of produced water for one barrel of oil. So you're getting more produced water than you are oil normally.

Mark Hinaman (22:27)
Yeah, very true in lots of parts of the country. So, okay, we've got this tremendously small amount of nuclear waste. We didn't talk about how we're handling it. What happens with spent nuclear fuel? What do do with it?

Camille Thompson (22:40)
It's kind of fun, honestly. We immediately put the rods into a...

a giant pool of water and those will stay there for about five to ten years. The water provides radiation shielding and cooling because those rods are both temperature hot. think when they come out of the reactor they can be over 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so insanely hot and hot radioactive wise. that water is providing shielding and cooling so much so that you could stand outside the pool and people do and you'd be completely fine. think most

of the danger with the pool would be if you fell in and you drowned. I think it's pretty safe to even swim in those pools. I'm not sure they recommend that, the rods. ⁓

Mark Hinaman (23:23)
There's a fantastic, sorry to cut you off, Camille, there's a fantastic

XKCD comic. Cameron, if you can find it. It's really quite hilarious, we should link to it.

Camille Thompson (23:35)
After the 10 years, the rods, or five to 10 years, the rods get, they get transferred to dry cask storage, which is pretty unimpressive. It's just really big concrete structures. They're not even actually that big. They're pretty small casks and they can just sit anywhere. They're safe to go touch, stand around. They're pretty robust so they can last. Like I think right now they're rated like around to 80 years, but it.

it wouldn't be hard to move those rods to other dry casks once the lifespan of those expires.

Mark Hinaman (24:07)
Yeah, what happens with those dry casks? What do we do with them?

Camille Thompson (24:11)
kind of just sit outside. think there were plans that they could bury them, but right now they're just in like, they could be in parking lots. I mean, they just sit outside.

Chloe (24:16)
There is no further discussion.

Mark Hinaman (24:21)
Yeah, it's.

Andrew O'Brien (24:21)
I saw a kind of a, read

a kind of a funny thing. You could repurpose it into like a paintball course, because they're so harmless. They just sit there and you might as well do something with them, right?

Chloe (24:24)
Thank you.

Mark Hinaman (24:32)
I think that would be a phenomenal use of a spent nuclear fuel site, like have a paintball facility. mean, it'd be super fun, right?

Andrew O'Brien (24:40)
yeah.

Chloe (24:41)
I'm

Mark Hinaman (24:42)
I there's, I mean, I know played Halo as a kid, there's like some, yeah, I think it would be reminiscent of like some of the futuristic, yeah, RPG shooting games. Are you guys aware of cask hugging as a hobby or a pastime?

Camille Thompson (24:55)
No, but maybe we should get into it.

Andrew O'Brien (24:55)
No, but I did

Chloe (24:57)
You

Andrew O'Brien (24:57)
have

fun.

Mark Hinaman (24:58)
It's ridiculous, well

it's funny, so there's nuclear advocates that have, in an effort to demonstrate how safe this nuclear fuel is, will go to existing temporary waste storage sites where they have, they're just parking lots, right, the big concrete slabs that have these casks in place and they will just hug casks and take pictures of them and post pictures of themselves on the internet and like...

and you know exactly how much radiation there is and it's completely safe, totally harmless.

Andrew O'Brien (25:31)
We'll have to organize a company trip out there, Mark.

Camille Thompson (25:31)
to be the name.

Chloe (25:35)
you

Mark Hinaman (25:35)
Yeah,

Camille Thompson (25:35)
I was going say that could be the next podcast.

Mark Hinaman (25:35)
two words. Anyone listening that wants to go to Ledgesco cask hug. brief out. Long term, why are people afraid of this spent nuclear fuel? Like they say, it's going to be a problem for 10,000 or a million years.

Andrew O'Brien (25:39)
You

Camille Thompson (25:51)
The, I mean, it's kind of a misnomer that it's gonna be really dangerous for like thousands of years. That transuranic, that's the concerning part of the spent fuel, which have, they have really long half-lives, so like.

Chloe (25:56)
Thank

it.

Camille Thompson (26:10)
on the order of thousands of years. But like we were talking about before, that can be like less than 1 % of the fuel. So it's very minimal. And there's also use for those, I think they call them true particles or true isotopes. They're fissionable. And so you can recycle those as well if you can get them out of the fuel. And it's really a very minimal part of the spent fuel that is actually dangerous for those long periods of time.

Chloe (26:36)
Yeah, I also think that a large part of it is people just don't know and they're aren't very educated on where it goes or what happens to it or you know, even how much is made. I think people just get the wrong idea of

what spent nuclear fuel actually is. And you know, it doesn't help that like shows like The Simpsons have always portrayed this green goo and you're gonna grow an extra limb or something. That's just not true, it's not gonna happen. people kind of, it's easy when you're here or grow up thinking one thing and then you kind of just always think that. And if you never look into it or question it at all, you're just gonna be afraid of it.

Andrew O'Brien (27:20)
Yeah, so sorry to bring it back to oil and gas, the arsenic in the produced water, that's toxic forever, right? If you were to eat it or ingest it in any way. And that's the same with the nuclear spent fuel.

Now, I think what people are afraid of is the radioactivity, like Camille kind of said, standing next to it. But that only lasts something like 600 years. And it's a bit nuanced. But after that, you can stand next to it no problem. And the real danger is just ingesting it the same way as lead or arsenic or any other kind of toxic material that we're used to dealing with.

Mark Hinaman (27:53)
Yeah, so I guess just saying it back, like we've got a hundred tons effectively of waste that's being generated from spent nuclear fuel.

So we have 100 tons of spent nuclear fuel that is a true waste that's generated every year versus was it 14? Sorry, I'm getting my numbers wrong. Yeah, 14,000 tons of arsenic that is produced every year with...

Chloe (28:11)
14,000 and yeah.

Mark Hinaman (28:19)
produced water. And we don't eat the arsenic, right? Like, we responsibly dispose of that. But we're paranoid about this spent nuclear fuel that you either might get exposed to it or ingest it somehow, which like, I don't know, it feels strange to me. Does that feel strange to you guys?

Andrew O'Brien (28:36)
It does, yeah, it feels like we're kind of ignoring the scientific truth here.

Mark Hinaman (28:40)
And

See what it'll be. What are we missing, guys?

Why do we think the public is so afraid of spent nuclear fuel?

Camille Thompson (28:47)
I think maybe an obvious answer is associating ⁓ nuclear fuel and nuclear power generation with disastrous events like Chernobyl and Fukushima. When really if you look at those it kind of boils down to...

reactor type mismanagement and such and there's a lot of regulation now on US reactors. We don't use the reactor in Chernobyl anymore so I think just maybe a...

an education societally of these reactors and how safe they actually are and associated waste with the industry and then maybe also like not looking enough into waste streams of other resources like solar and wind and being.

unfair to nuclear because there's waste streams with everything and once you really dig into it, nuclear is really not bad at all. It's pretty cool how much energy you're producing for such little waste that can be properly managed.

Mark Hinaman (29:49)
Yeah, awesome. Why do we think the oil and gas waste doesn't get nearly the same kind of attention or scrutiny?

Chloe (29:56)
Yeah, I think a big part of that is just how important oil and gas is to a lot of countries, to the economy and just like the general way we live life right now. You know, it's always been kind of important just for producing energy and developing countries. I also think they, I mean, I think it's got to have some deal with.

something will happen and then they kind of just fix it and then it gets pushed under the rug and people forget about it and it's like why isn't this thing being applied to nuclear? Like yeah there will always be an accident that's kind of like you will never have an energy that doesn't have an accident or some you know downside there's pros and cons everywhere but it's kind of like at some point we have to move on.

You know, we can't keep pointing to something that happened 50, 60, 70 years ago when, you know, technology advances so quickly. Like, why do we keep pointing to the same thing over and over again when the oil and gas industry, they're like, yeah, we fixed it. It won't happen again. You know, it is what it is. We deal with it. We know how to do it. And it's like, so do we. So does the nuclear industry, you know?

Mark Hinaman (31:11)
Yeah. ⁓

Andrew O'Brien (31:11)
Yeah, I think it's a couple

things like.

We're incredibly familiar with what the oil and gas industry produces, whether it's gas or oil or the plastics we use. So we get to see in our regular everyday lives kind of the fruits of that industry versus nuclear. It's a lot more indirect. We have a lot less exposure. And I think one thing that came up was that communities who live by nuclear plants are a lot more likely to support of nuclear energy. So think it's just having familiarity with the energy really reduces kind of the

the stigma and the fear around its waste streams. I also think that we really love our cheap gas and so we're really willing to accept some waste so that it doesn't cost too much to fill up our cars.

Mark Hinaman (31:58)
Yeah, think, and really what people might love is like the enablement, right? Not just the product of gasoline, but like what it provides. So Chloe, I really, really like your framing of that, which is like there's trade-offs in every energy system. And we look at those trade-offs and society chooses between them like on a daily basis. And I love your framing of like...

oil and gas has had problems with produced water and certainly like they're not exempt, right? Like they're not allowed to pollute and yeah, it happens and bad things happens and we should police them and like certainly they've got the reputation and I say they, it's we too, right? I was oil and gas for 10 years, longer than that growing up. like it's, I am from this space. I've got friends and family and peers that have existed in it my entire life. Like they don't get a free pass. We don't get a free pass.

You know, there's superfund sites that have been generated and there's pollutants that exist, yet it continues, right? I think your framing of it that there's trade-offs and kind of a net benefit to it is a really helpful way to think about it.

Chloe (33:02)
Yeah, I also think a good part of it too is when a nuclear, know, like Chernobyl, when it melts down, you know, the whole world hears about it. But if a spill happens on the side of a highway, you know, it's going to be the local news and that's about it. So it's also just kind of about how much you really hear about the accidents or the cons of the energy.

And also just how frequently, like, I feel like if you dig into it, it's, there's going to be more than people realize.

Mark Hinaman (33:35)
So how do we change the narrative on that? I mean, we need like empowering stories of nuclear fuel that allow society to move forward and have kind of the opposite positive effect. like the stories of the offensive guard or offensive lineman that does his job every single play of the game never gets told, right? Like that's the nuclear is out here just chugging along every single day, not hurting anyone.

Camille Thompson (34:00)
I think one thing is switching the terminology that you're using. ⁓ One thing that you, taught us was instead of saying nuclear waste, moving to saying spent nuclear fuel. I think a lot of the fear can hide behind terminology that maybe not everybody understands. meltdown and really scary terms like radioactive can kind of generate this fear. So switching to terms that are...

maybe not any less scientifically correct or even more technologically correct, but that create lots of a fear or stigma around nuclear in society.

Mark Hinaman (34:35)
Yeah, it's education, right? What role does education have in changing that?

Chloe (34:40)
big role, think. I think, and it's also a lot of people, there's, feel like two main arguments is the price and the waste is the thing that people are afraid of for nuclear. But it's so hard because what the last nuclear reactor just got built like not too long ago for like the first one in 50 years. it's just like getting it more normalized, more standardized. It needs to be like

in policy too. And I think the only way to really get people to support it is through education and through teaching people that this is a good energy source. There's no carbon coming from it. This is a clean energy.

Camille Thompson (35:26)
kind of

Andrew O'Brien (35:26)
Yeah,

guess, yeah, I agree education is key and to kind of push that education. I guess what people can do is, you if you're a college student, you can advocate in your local sustainability club or energy club to bring in speakers from the nuclear industry. I know we're involved with a group called the Colorado Nuclear Alliance and one of our big.

pursuits is to push education onto the public, whether that's through colleges or through legislature. But yeah, find routes to advocate for nuclear education. think that's the best way to make this change kind of come to fruition.

Mark Hinaman (36:05)
through podcasting, right? but guys, what, well, I'll say when we did the study, right, we didn't come at it with like, I'll say religious or, well, did any of you come at this with any preconceived notions and were you surprised by any of the outcomes and numbers that we found?

Camille Thompson (36:24)
To be completely honest, thought spent nuclear fuel is a lot more dangerous than it was. I believed that we could definitely handle it safely, but actually looking at the numbers and how much of it is just simply not radioactive and naturally occurring is outstanding. And then also looking at how safely it's contained after and how simple it is. I mean, the dry casks, like we said, are just cement.

It's kind of crazy how much I was personally swayed by public opinion and media portrayal of spent nuclear fuel and that's really just not the case.

Chloe (37:01)
Yeah, I think the biggest thing that I learned was I didn't know that the produced water from oil and gas had radionuclides. ⁓ my gosh. Radionuclides in it. was I saw that and I was like, what? was like, everyone sitting here and all is all afraid that the nuclear industry like radioactive. You're going to this is so dangerous. And then daily, like the oil and gas industry is pulling this up from the ground and they it's like

Why is no one talking about this? Why is no one concerned about it, you know? And it just really surprised me and it's obviously it's natural occurring. So, you know, I guess people hear that and think it's not as dangerous, but it's still, there's still radioactivity there. And, know, everyone I saw, I went into a rabbit hole of it and they like to tell the truck drivers that there's no more radioactivity than a banana, which is not always true.

Because sometimes you get really radioactive loads because it always varies. But I don't know, that really surprised me that no one talks about that.

Mark Hinaman (38:08)
Yeah, like maybe a more helpful solution or like thing to do would be like have a Geiger counter on some truck drive like trucks and like the inlet outlet of trucks to like measure specific loads and say like just be aware of it, right?

Chloe (38:23)
Yeah, I think there was one story I read about, I think they come by every so often and measure it and just, you know, kind of get a check in. And I think one time he like told the driver, he's like, yeah, this is a hot load you have. And he was like, hold on, what do you mean? He's like, I wasn't aware of this. So it was just kind of surprising to hear that story.

Mark Hinaman (38:41)
Yeah.

So, Andrew, I like your recommendation on advising policymakers, talking to your peers. mean, this is how society changes, right? With progressive opinions. We're all engineers, and so we like looking at the data, and data tells us stories. But not everyone's all about data like we are, digging in the numbers to be persuaded.

about ideas. So if you had one minute with, I guess, the whole population, what's one thing that you would explain to them or say to them to help them understand nuclear waste or the nuclear industry in general?

Camille Thompson (39:17)
waiting for a chance to be able to say this. We watched this really stupid video, it wasn't stupid, but ⁓ it was like an astronaut cartoon and it was somebody like convincing people that you could go swim in the spent nuclear pools so I think I would make it like...

get some news there somehow, I don't know what I would do, but then fall into the pool and swim there and then prove that they're really safe. I think it would be kind of cool too, it would be a really good bar story to be like, actually swam in a spent fuel pool.

Mark Hinaman (39:48)
Don't let anyone from the nuclear industry hear about that. If people are going to listen to this now and be like, Camille Thompson wants to do a stone-and-stone nuclear fuel pool.

Camille Thompson (39:56)
Everybody has to have my back here because I feel like it would be cool. And if it's helpful for educating society, then anybody who has access to a Spentfield pool has to disregard this.

Mark Hinaman (40:07)
We've moved beyond cask hugging and now we're into pool swimming. we're gonna swim meets and spend the glue food. We're not actually gonna recommend that, but yeah. Okay, what else? Anything else?

Andrew O'Brien (40:21)
Yeah, mean, besides just showing the data, which appeals, like you said, to an engineer like me, ⁓ just touting the incredible clean energy potential of nuclear energy. And we always hear that the waste is the big problem, but in reality, it's quite literally a very small problem, like an incredibly small problem. And I think we've kind of proved that through this analysis.

Chloe (40:43)
I think there's a million statistics that I've learned that are so helpful and surprising, I think throwing random statistics at people might just, you know, they're gonna fall asleep or something. So I think the main thing I would say is just go educate yourself because, you know, there's how many clean energies out there, you know, like there's new ones evolving every day, but.

When you really look at how energy dense nuclear is, it's so impressive. And I think there's just so many technological advances we can take with it besides just powering your house. There's so many things that think this can do, that nuclear can achieve.

Andrew O'Brien (41:27)
How about you, Mark? What would you say?

Mark Hinaman (41:30)
You know a strategy that I like to employ Especially if I hear somebody ask or say things that sound incorrect to me is just like continue asking questions I think I mentioned this to you guys like until you reach the edge of someone's knowledge And it doesn't take that many questions to oftentimes get there and so like if you hear facts that you people tout or things they say that sound sound incorrect or are incorrect rather than just saying like

spouting back or a buttle or a statistic back at him like taking kind of a more Philosophical point of view Socratist Socratic use the Socratic method right like asking. How do you know that? Well, where did you learn that? Well, what statistic did you have? What do they actually do? How do you know it's dangerous and one question that I find like to be really helpful is well How will this actually hurt us like what's the mechanism that this hazard will actually like?

get into my body and when can I be exposed to it and how might that happen? And often times there's a lot of misconceptions about the answer to that question.

And then encouraging people to go, you should go double check that. I don't think you're right on that. Like don't need to disprove you, but like don't take my word for it. Go check, go check yourself. So I like that recommendation. ⁓ Okay. So, but management strategies for waste or spent nuclear fuel. I don't think we touched on right now. It just sits in a parking lot, right? Like then people are the department of energy has a whole program about consent based siting and people want to aggregate it all into one spot.

Do we think this is necessary? And this might be beyond the scope of just this discussion, but we had it in our notes. So let's talk a little bit about potential strategies for mitigating the spent nuclear fuel, which if it were up to me, like.

It's not hurting anyone right now. It's literally in place as it is, like just taking up a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, 10 to the six varies small amount of waste of space relative to again, other forms of waste that other energy technologies are generating. But if we had to do something with it, what could we do with it?

Andrew O'Brien (43:37)
I agree with you, Mark. I'm still kind of on team paintball course. But if we had to do something different, ⁓ there's a number of...

Mark Hinaman (43:43)
Yes, absolutely. It'll be

a net positive for society because then we're actually generating revenue off of a spent nuclear fuel storage facility, right?

Andrew O'Brien (43:53)
Exactly.

You could take it another route, make it like a place for graffiti artists or murals to go up. There's all kinds of things you could do with that. But if you wanted to move it out of that of that sort of storage, I know the government's floated the Yucca Mountain idea. could also, there's a startup out there called Deep Isolation. You could do something like that where you're putting it very deep under the ground, isolating it for...

the eternity essentially. I think that's a little bit overkill. We can let it sit in parking lots as it already is, but there's definitely options.

Mark Hinaman (44:24)
Is the spent nuclear fuel water soluble? Are the materials in it? Can they be dissolved in water?

Camille Thompson (44:30)
I mean the uranium.

Mark Hinaman (44:32)
Uranium is water soluble, So there's parts of it can be actually dissolved in water. then, mean, theoretically, you could just inject it into the produced water stream that already exists and inject it into the subsurface, right? That'd be like a very potentially rational solution to like spend nuclear fuel if you wanted to remove it from the biosphere and not operate a paintball court or a graffiti.

Camille Thompson (44:34)
the U238

Chloe (44:59)
Yeah, I know that France also has technology to just constantly recycle the spent nuclear fuel. I know there's a lot of that are researching that and trying to look into that. So that's potentially a good option in the future.

Mark Hinaman (45:15)
Le Haig. I don't know if I pronounced that correctly. I'm sure all the French will hate us even more than they already do, even though I absolutely love them for my attempted French pronunciation.

⁓ Yeah, recycling, absolutely an option. We've said several times, like, there's still value left in this uranium. There are additional companies looking at spent nuclear fuel recycling in the United States and internationally. So, happy to recommend folks to go and learn about some of those companies.

else guys, what did we miss?

Andrew O'Brien (45:47)
Mark, with having kind of a foot in both industries, oil and gas and nuclear, I guess big takeaway, what can the nuclear industry learn from oil and gas when comes to waste streams and waste disposal?

Mark Hinaman (46:01)
Yeah, great question Andrew. So my number one recommendation for that is make money off of the productive front end of the cycle and really focus on that. I mean I think the nuclear industry has been able to address this waste problem, bring so much hype and attention to it because the front end of their cycle works so well.

Nuclear plants work incredibly well. They function reliably. It takes a lot of hard work to put in and produce energy. then lots of smart engineers with great designs work hard to make it happen. I think they can say, when we have a solution that's good enough, let's call it good enough and just be done with it and not go and try and solve problems that don't actually exist.

So I think that's a big takeaway that I see. The oil and gas industry can be super efficient with cost management and with not prioritizing problems that aren't actually big problems, aren't going to move the needle or move the bottom line.

and then be radically effective at generating new technology, building new products, iterating, being innovative, far, far more ⁓ rapid at technology development than the nuclear industry. if nuclear could...

say like we know this is dangerous but we're you know we're gonna like manage it and it's okay and we're not going to focus on that problem that is like frankly less of a problem than other problems we could be solving then and let's go tackle like the bigger productive front end problems that we want to solve. I don't know if that answered your question Andrew or if that was

Andrew O'Brien (47:38)
That was awesome, thank you.

Mark Hinaman (47:39)
Okay, guys, well we're coming up on our time ⁓ You mentioned an essay article that we haven't published yet, but we intend to publish Soon or shortly or groups to coincide with this podcast episode. So we wanted to have both so that people could consume the content both in the written form and email it to folks that they're interested in and then also listen to it while they're commuting or Exercising or doing however, however, you consume your podcast

Guys, I really appreciate the time and hard work that you put into it. Any closing thoughts before we sign off?

Chloe (48:12)
⁓ Yeah, I think it's time for the nuclear industry to be confident in its technology. Kind of take a note out of the oil and gas industry and be confident and move forward and know what we have and what their technology is.

Mark Hinaman (48:27)
I love it, Chloe. Camille and Andrew?

Andrew O'Brien (48:29)
I like it. think we got

to start holding all energy to the same standard and start treating wastes from different sources on the level playing field.

Camille Thompson (48:38)
I would agree and I would urge people to go research all of these new technologies because they're really cool once you dive into them. There are some really cool nuclear technologies coming out and all the companies associated are also really cool.

Mark Hinaman (48:51)
Awesome, yeah, I appreciate it guys. Thanks so much for the time.

Chloe (48:55)
Thank you. thanks.

Camille Thompson (48:56)
Thanks, Farah. ⁓

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