 So you've seen episodes of The Simpsons or other movies where the nuclear waste is leaking and it's glowing green and it either gives you superpowers or it kills you or maybe one and then the other. That's not actually what happens. Most of the solid materials in nuclear waste, they're just that. They're solid. They don't leak. And even the liquid materials in nuclear waste, those containers are so robust that we actually have tests that we've done that are on video and you can go out and watch on YouTube, douse them in jet fuel and putting them on a train and running another train at them with a metal spike aimed at a concrete wall or dropping them off of a helicopter. These are the sorts of tests that we do for nuclear waste containers and they have to survive every single one. It's like we can't throw anything at these containers that gets them to break apart. Your immediate reaction is fear and that's a natural reaction. We're all built with a fight-or-flight response for a reason. It's kept us out of danger and it's why the human race still exists as we haven't been eaten to death. The reason we call nuclear a clean energy alternative is that it does not emit CO2, carbon dioxide, when you use it. When you actually use the fuel, it produces absolutely no CO2. Eating one banana gives you 11 times as much radiation as living within 15 miles of a nuclear plant for a year. If you live near a coal power plant, you get 30 times as much radiation as you do if you live near a nuclear plant. The point of a power plant is to make electricity. And they all do so by heating up water to make steam to drive a turbine. That turbine drives an alternator like what's in your car or a generator and that's what produces electricity. The way nuclear power heats up water is that these fissile atoms like uranium-235 split apart when neutrons hit them. And the fragments, called fission products, release a lot of energy. They bounce around the other atoms heating them up and water flows around them making steam that drives a turbine and makes electricity. Nuclear waste is all the leftover stuff when you're done running the reactor or you're done using the fuel. This includes those fission products that we talked about, the structural materials nearby that have absorbed some of the neutrons and become radioactive, and anything else radioactive that we don't want to get to the outside world. Radioactivity can damage your cells, your DNA, and eventually cause cancer. The question is though, how much radiation does it take to do this? And the answer is a whole lot more than the amount we naturally tolerate every day. We've evolved in a constantly radioactive world. There's radiation coming from space, from the ground, from the air, the food you eat. Contains potassium, carbon-14, they're all naturally radioactive occurring isotopes. The building materials from your house, they're radioactive. There's a lot of natural background radiation that all of life has evolved to tolerate. The radiation from uncontained nuclear waste is way more than the body can tolerate. Luckily for us, when it's properly contained, the amount that we're exposed to is next to nothing. It's contained within metal fuel rods called fuel clotting. Those are contained in fuel assemblies, and those fuel assemblies are sealed up in either copper, stainless steel, or concrete containers. So there's multiple barriers keeping everything inside that waste container. I'd gladly live next to a nuclear waste burial site. Right now, we seal up nuclear waste and store it on site at the power plants. But what I'd really like to see us do is get some value out of that waste. So how much of the fuel do you think actually gets used in the reactor? 90%, 80%, 70%, 60%, 50%, 40%, no, 5%. 5% of the fuel is actually used. 95% of the useful fuel exits the reactor as waste. So you might be wondering, well, geez, why are reactors so bad at utilizing their own fuel? Well, it's because even that 5% ends up making things called neutron poisons. Because they take neutrons away from what otherwise would make uranium split apart. Now, you can chemically separate out those fission products and recycle the fuel as fresh fuel. And this is actually done in France, Japan, most other countries. The US is quite unique in we have laws against reprocessing. So you might be surprised at how much other valuable stuff there is in waste. Gold, silver, platinum, rhodium, ruthenium. Some of the other waste products like plutonium-238 and strontium-90 are used to power spacecrafts that go too far from the sun, where you can't use solar power. There are a bunch of other valuable byproducts of a nuclear reaction. There's tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, and helium-3, an isotope of helium that's missing a neutron. The street value of those gases are $30,000 and $53,000 a kilogram. Helium-3 is really good at detecting neutrons, which is usually tricky to do. And it's so valuable, and we need it so much, that it's economically feasible to mine it on the moon. It actually makes economic sense to send a rocket to the moon, accumulate helium-3 and bring it back to Earth. If we could get that from the reactors we already have, that would be fantastic.