Nuclear Waste: 3 Options

- [Narrator] One of the challenges of nuclear is what to do with the spent fuel rods. Basically, there are three options. Some people call this nuclear waste, and think it should go into a permanent repository. - What should we do with the waste that's been produced? - We should send it to Yucca Mountain. - A geologic repository. - A geologic repository, yeah. There's a lot of misimpressions about this fuel. They say it will last for thousands of years. In fact, most of the radioactivity goes away after 150 years. - Okay. - Yucca Mountain, I think after 20 years of building it, in experience, we now know that we could do a lot better. We've learned a lot of the issues. Main thing people worry about in Yucca Mountain, the experts, is that the nuclear fuel, when it's down there for a really long period of time will start heating up the rock. And that could, in certain circumstances lead to, if water leaks in, could cause some sort of a problem. - Yeah. - Yucca Mountain, in my mind, is fine. - [Interviewer] Is fine, yeah. - Yeah. - And as a geologist, I know there are some uncertainties, but I would tend to agree. - [Narrator] Others think the energy in the spent fuel rods should be recycled into new fuel. - We extract actually 96% of the material from the waste, that we can recycle. And the 4% of the final ash, are vitrified. That can be put away for about a million year. So we reduce the volume of waste from 100% to 4%, 96% in mass can be reused. Some of it could be reused in the current fleet of reactors, and the rest would be reused in the next generation of reactor called fast reactors, fast neutron reactors, but all of it could be reused. Actually, we have made the calculation that right now, after we build the next generation of fast reactors, in the 2050s, 2040s, we won't need any more new uranium. No more. So we reuse most of it, and what we cannot reuse, we safely store it. Which in my opinion is the right thing to do. - [Narrator] The third option is to put the spent fuel in dry casks, and decide what to do with it later. - Managing it in dry storage, we know can be done for a very, very long time. Secondly, it's cheap. Third, while you're doing that, the stuff is cooling off, radioactivity is going down. You're only making life easier. Even if we are in the future, to go to new forms of reactors, sometimes called breeder reactors. They make more fuel. It's not obvious whether we should start those with plutonium, which we would take out of today's spent fuel, in which case, today's spent fuel is a resource. Or, slightly more highly enriched uranium in which case, today's spent fuel is in fact waste. We don't know the answer to that question. - [Narrator] Dry storage, recycling or disposal. Any of these methods are technologically possible. But politically, we have not been able to make a decision. Instead, most of the world's reactors have been keeping spent fuel in cooling pools for as much as 30 years, waiting for us to make up our minds, but space is running out."