50 min
Deep Geologic Repository? Willing to Listen feat: Sheila Whytock We CANDU It
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- Science
Nuclear waste. The bogeyman of industrial wastes and yet it has been fully contained for the 60 years of commercial power plant operation without a single fatality worldwide over that time period. Compare that to fossil fuels which kill over 3 million per year from waste that is simply dumped into the atmosphere and is rapidly heating our planet such that it might not be conducive to human civilization in a few hundred years.
How bad is nuclear waste and what are we going to do with it? Relative risk assessment is not a strong point for the minds of homo sapiens. Deep geologic storage of nuclear waste involves many barriers. Solid ceramic used fuel pellets are housed inside a zirconium fuel rod in a steel cask, surrounded by a copper cannister, surrounded by bentonite clay surrounded by rock which takes water 3 million years to move 1 meter through it buried half a kilometer deep.
I am joined by Sheila Whytock who is a nuclear operator at Bruce Power and leads the community group “willing to listen” which seeks to engage the community with the Deep Geological Repository research process.
Nuclear waste. The bogeyman of industrial wastes and yet it has been fully contained for the 60 years of commercial power plant operation without a single fatality worldwide over that time period. Compare that to fossil fuels which kill over 3 million per year from waste that is simply dumped into the atmosphere and is rapidly heating our planet such that it might not be conducive to human civilization in a few hundred years.
How bad is nuclear waste and what are we going to do with it? Relative risk assessment is not a strong point for the minds of homo sapiens. Deep geologic storage of nuclear waste involves many barriers. Solid ceramic used fuel pellets are housed inside a zirconium fuel rod in a steel cask, surrounded by a copper cannister, surrounded by bentonite clay surrounded by rock which takes water 3 million years to move 1 meter through it buried half a kilometer deep.
I am joined by Sheila Whytock who is a nuclear operator at Bruce Power and leads the community group “willing to listen” which seeks to engage the community with the Deep Geological Repository research process.
50 min